Phantom Fortune Part 58

It was nearly one o'clock, and the ball had thinned a little, which made it all the better for those who remained. Mr. Smithson's orders had been given two days ago, and the very best of the waiters had been told off for his especial service. The ladies went upstairs to take off their wrappings and m.u.f.flings, and Lesbia emerged dazzling from her brown velvet Newmarket, while Lady Kirkbank, bending closely over the looking-gla.s.s, like a witch over a caldron, repaired her complexion with cotton wool.

They went through the conservatory to the octagon dining-room, where the supper was ready, a special supper, on a table by a window, a table laden with exotics and brilliant with gla.s.s and silver. The supper was, of course, perfect in its way. Mr. Smithson's _chef_ had been down to see about it, and Mr. Smithson's own particular champagne and the claret grown in his own particular _clos_ in the Gironde, had been sent down for the feast. No common cuisine, no common wine could be good enough; and yet there was a day when the cheapest gargote in Belleville or Montmartre was good enough for Mr. Smithson. There had been days on which he did not dine at all, and when the fumes of a _gibelotte_ steaming from a workman's restaurant made his mouth water.

The supper was all life and gaiety. Everyone was hungry and thirsty, and fres.h.i.+oned by the drive, except Lesbia. She was singularly silent, ate hardly anything, but drank three or four gla.s.ses of champagne.

Don Gomez was not a great talker. He had the air of a prince of the blood royal, who expects other people to talk and to keep him amused, But the little he said was to the point. He had a fine baritone, very low and subdued, and had a languor which was almost insolent, but not without its charm. There was an air of originality about the manner and the man.

He was the typical _rastaquouere_, a man of finished manners, and unknown antecedents, a foreigner, apparently rich, obviously accomplished, but with that indefinable air which bespeaks the adventurer; and which gives society as fair a warning as if the man wore a placard on his shoulder with the word _cave_.

But to Lesbia this Spaniard was the first really interesting man she had met since she saw John Hammond; and her interest in him was much more vivid than her interest in Hammond had been at the beginning of their acquaintance. That pale face, with its tint of old ivory, those thin, finely-cut lips, indicative of diabolical craft, could she but read aright, those unfathomable eyes, touched her fancy as it had never yet been touched, awoke within her that latent vein of romance, self-abnegation, supreme foolishness, which lurks in the nature of every woman, be she chaste as ice and pure as snow.

The supper was long. It was past two o'clock, and the ballroom was thinly occupied, when Mr. Smithson's party went there.

'You won't dance to-night, I suppose?' said Smithson, as Lesbia and he went slowly down the room arm in arm. It was in a pause between two waltzes. The wide window at the end was opened to the summer night, and the room was delightfully cool. 'You must be horribly tired?'

'I am not in the least tired, and I mean to waltz, if anyone will ask me,' replied Lesbia, decisively.

'I ought to have asked you to dance, and then it would have been the other way,' said Smithson, with a touch of acrimony. 'Surely you have dancing enough in town, and you might be obliging for once in a way, and come and sit with me in the garden, and listen to the nightingales.'

'There are no nightingales after June. There is the Manola,' as the band struck up, 'my very favourite waltz.'

Don Gomez was at her elbow at this moment

'May I have the honour of this waltz with you, Lady Lesbia?' he asked; and then with a serio-comic glance at his stoutish friend, 'I don't think Smithson waltzes?'

'I have been told that n.o.body can waltz who has been born on this side of the Pyrenees,' answered Lesbia, withdrawing her arm from her lover's, and slipping, it through the Spaniard's, with the air of a slave who obeys a master.

Smithson looked daggers, and retired to a corner of the room glowering.

Were a man twenty-two times millionaire, like the Parisian Rothschild, he could not find armour against the poisoned arrows of jealousy. Don Gomez possessed many of those accomplishments which make men dangerous, but as a dancer he was _hors ligne_; and Horace Smithson knew that there is no surer road to a girl's fancy than the magic circle of a waltz.

Those two were floating round the room in the old slow legato step, which recalled to Smithson the picture of a still more s.p.a.cious room in an island under the Southern Cross--the blue water of the bay s.h.i.+ning yonder under the starlight of the tropics, fire-flies gleaming and flas.h.i.+ng in the foliage beyond the open windows, fire-flies flas.h.i.+ng amidst the gauzy draperies of the dancers, and this same Gomez revolving with the same slow languid grace, his arm encircling the _svelte_ figure of a woman whose southern beauty outshone Lesbia's blonde English loveliness as the tropical stars outs.h.i.+ne the lamps that light our colder skies. Yes, every detail of the scene flashed back into his mind, as if a curtain had been suddenly plucked back from a long-hidden picture. The Cuban's tall slim figure, the head gently bent towards his partner's head, as at this moment, and those dark eyes looking up at him, intoxicated with that nameless, indefinable fascination which it is the lot of some men to exercise.

'He robbed me of _her_!' thought Smithson, gloomily. 'Will he rob me of this one too? Surely not! Havana is Havana--and this one is not a Creole. If I cannot trust that lovely piece of marble, there is no woman on earth to be trusted.'

He turned his back upon the dancers, and went out into the garden. His soul was wrung with jealousy, yet he could watch no longer. There was too much pain--there were too many bitter memories of shame, and loss, and ignominy evoked by that infernal picture. If he had been free he would have a.s.serted his authority as Lesbia's future husband; he would have taken her away from the Orleans; he would have told her plainly and frankly that Don Gomez was no fit person for her to know; and he would have so planned that they two should never meet again. But Horace Smithson was not free. He was bound hand and foot by those fetters which the chain of past events had forged--stern facts which the man himself may forget, or try to forget, but which other people never forget. There is generally some dark spot in the history of such men as Smithson--men who climb the giddiest heights of this world with that desperate rapidity which implies many a perilous leap from crag to crag, many a moraine skimmed over, and many an awful gulf spanned by a hair-breadth bridge. Mr. Smithson's history was not without such spots; and the darkest of all had relation to his career in Cuba. The story had been known by very few--perhaps completely known only by one man; and that man was Gomez de Montesma.

For the last fifteen years the most fervent desire of Horace Smithson's heart had been the hope that tropical nature, in any one of her various disagreeable forms, would be obliging enough to make an end of Gomez.

But the forces of nature had not worked on Mr. Smithson's side. No loathsome leprosy had eaten his enemy's flesh; neither cayman nor crocodile, neither Juba snake nor poisonous spider had marked him for its prey. The tropical sun had left him unsmitten. He had lived and he had prospered; and he was here, like a guilty conscience incarnate, to spoil Horace Smithson's peace.

'I must be diplomatic,' Smithson said to himself, as he walked up and down an avenue of Irish yews, in a solitary part of the grounds, smoking his cigarette, and hearing the music swell and sink in the distance. 'I will give her a hint as to that man's character, and I will keep them apart as much as I can. But if he forces himself upon me there is no help for it. I cannot afford to be uncivil to him.'

'Cannot afford' in this instance meant 'dare not,' and Horace Smithson's thoughts as he paced the yew-tree walk were full of gloom.

During that long meditation he made up his mind on one point, namely, that, let him suffer what pangs he might, he must not betray his jealousy. To do that would be to lower himself in Lesbia's eyes, and to play into his rival's hand; for a jealous man is almost always contemptible in the sight of his mistress. He would carry himself as if he were sure of her fidelity; and this very confidence, with a woman of honour, a girl reared as Lesbia had been reared, would render it impossible for her to betray him. He would show himself high-minded, confident, generous, chivalrous, even; and he would trust to chance for the issue. Chance were Mr. Smithson's only idea of Divinity; and Chance had hitherto been kind to him. There had been dark hours in his life, but the darkness had not lasted long; and the lucky accidents of his career had been of a nature to beguile him into the belief that among the favourites of Destiny he stood first and foremost.

While Mr. Smithson mused thus, alone and in the darkness, Montesma and Lady Lesbia were wandering arm in arm in another and lovelier part of the grounds, where golden lights were scattered like Cuban fire-flies among the foliage of seringa and magnolia, arbutus and rhododendron, while at intervals a sudden flush of rosier light was shed over garden and river, as if by enchantment, surprising a couple here and there in the midst of a flirtation which had begun in darkness.

The grounds were lovely in the balmy atmosphere of a July night, the river gliding with mysterious motion under the stars, great ma.s.ses of gloom darkening the stream with an almost awful look where the woods of Petersham and Ham House cast their dense shadows on the water. Don Gomez and his companion wandered by the river side to a spot where a group of magnolias sheltered them from the open lawn, and where there were some rustic chairs close to the bal.u.s.trade which protected the parapet. In this spot, which was a kind of island, divided from the rest of the grounds by the intervening road, they found themselves quite alone, and in the midst of a summer stillness which was broken only by the low, lazy ripple of the tide running seawards. The lights of Richmond looked far away, and the little town with its variety of levels had an Italian air in the distance.

From the ballroom, faint and fitful, came the music of a waltz.

'I'm afraid I've brought you too far,' said Don Gomez.

'On the contrary, it is a relief to get away from the lights and the people. How delicious this river is! I was brought up on the sh.o.r.es of a lake; but after all a lake is horribly tame. Its limits are always staring one in the face. There is no room for one's imagination to wander. Now a river like this suggests an infinity of possibilities, drifting on and on and on into undiscovered regions, by ever-varying sh.o.r.es. I feel to-night as if I should like to step into that little boat yonder,' pointing to a light skiff bobbing gently up and down with the tide, at the bottom of a flight of steps, 'and let the stream take me wherever it chose.'

'If I could but go with you,' said Gomez, in that deep and musical tone which made the commonest words seem melody, 'I would ask for neither compa.s.s nor rudder. What could it matter whither the boat took me? There is no place under the stars which would not be a paradise--with you.'

'Please don't make a dreamy aspiration the occasion for a compliment,'

exclaimed Lesbia, lightly. 'What I said was so silly that I don't wonder you thought it right to say something just a little sillier. But moonlight and running water have a curious effect upon me; and I, who am the most prosaic among women, become ridiculously sentimental.'

'I cannot believe that you are prosaic.'

'I a.s.sure you it is perfectly true. I am of the earth, earthy; a woman of the world, in my first season, ambitious, fond of pleasure, vain, proud, exacting, all those things which I am told a woman ought not to be.'

'You pain me when you so slander yourself; and I shall make it the business of my life to find out how much truth there is in that self-slander. For my own part I do not believe a word of it; but as it is rude to contradict a lady I will only say that I reserve my opinion.'

'Are you to stay long in England?' asked Lesbia.

She was leaning against the stone bal.u.s.trade in a careless att.i.tude, as of one who was weary, her elbow on the stone slab, and her head thrown hack against her arm. The white satin gown, moulded to her figure, had a statuesque air, and she looked like a marble statue in the dim light, every line of the graceful form expressive of repose.

'That will depend. I am not particularly fond of London. A very little of your English Babylon satisfies me, in a general way; but there are conditions which might make England enchanting. Where do you go at the end of the season?'

'First to Goodwood, and then to Cowes. Mr. Smithson is so kind as to place his yacht at Lady Kirkbank's disposal, and I am to be her guest on board the Cayman, just as I am in Arlington Street.'

'The Cayman! That name is a reminiscence of Mr. Smithson's South American travels.'

'No doubt! Was he long in South America?'

'Three or four years.'

'But not in Cuba all that time, I suppose?'

'He had business relations with Cuba all that time, and oscillated between our island and the main. He was rather fortunate in his little adventures with us--made almost as much money as General Tacon, of blessed memory. But I dare say Smithson has told you all his adventures in that part of the world.'

'No, he very rarely talks about his travels: and I am not particularly interested in commercial speculations. There is always so much to think of and talk about in the business of the moment. Are you fond of Cuba?'

'Not pa.s.sionately. I always feel as if I were an exile there, and yet one of my ancestors was with Columbus when be discovered the island, and my race were among the earliest settlers. My family has given three Captain-generals to Cuba: but I cannot forget that I belong to an older world, and have forfeited that which ought to have been a brilliant place in Europe for the luxurious obscurity of a colony.'

'But you must be attached to a place in which your family have lived for so many generations?'

'I like the stars and the sea, the mountains and savannas, the tropical vegetation, and the dreamy, half-oriental life; but at best it is a kind of stagnation, and after a residence of a few months in the island of my birth I generally spread my wings for the wider world of the old continent or the new.'

'You must have travelled so much,' said Lesbia, with a sigh. 'I have been nowhere and seen nothing. I feel like a child who has been shut up in a nursery all its life, and knows of no world beyond four walls.'

'Not to travel is not to live,' said Don Gomez.

'I am to be in Italy next November, I believe,' said Lesbia, not caring to own that this Italian trip was to be her honeymoon.