God's Good Man Part 56

"Shall I tell you?"

"Do! I shall appreciate the favour!"

For a moment she hesitated. A great pain and sorrow clouded her eyes.

"No woman marries a leper by choice!"--she said at last, slowly.

He glanced at her,--then shrugged his shoulders.

"You talk in parables. Pardon me if I am too dull to understand you!"

"You understand me well enough,"--she answered--"But if you wish it, I will speak more plainly. I dream of love---"

"Most women do!" he interrupted her, smilingly--"And I am sure you dream charmingly. But is a middle-aged parson part of the romantic vision?"

She paid no heed to this sarcasm. She had moved a pace or two away from him, and now stood, her head slightly uplifted, her eyes turned wistfully towards the picturesque gables of the Manor outlined clearly in the moon against the dense night sky.

"I dream of love!"--she repeated softly,--while he, smoking tranquilly, and looking the very image of a tailor's model in his faultlessly cut dress suit, spotless s.h.i.+rt front, and aggressively neat white tie, studied her face, her figure and her att.i.tude with amused interest--"But my dream is not what the world offers me as the dream's realisation! The love that I mean--the love that I seek- -the love that I want--the love that I will have,"--and she raised her hand involuntarily with a slight gesture which almost implied a command--"or else go loveless all my days--is an honest love,-- loyal, true and pure!--and strong enough to last through this life and all the lives to come!"

"If there are any!"--interpolated Roxmouth, blandly.

She looked at him,--and a vague expression of something like physical repulsion flitted across her face.

"It is no use talking to you,"--she said--"For you believe in nothing--not even in G.o.d! You are a man of your own making--you are not a man in the true sense of manhood. How can you know anything of love? You will not find it in the low haunts of Paris where you are so well known,--where your name is a byword as that of an English 'milord' who degrades his Order!"

"What do YOU know of the low haunts of Paris?" he queried with a cold laugh--"Is Louis Gigue your informant?'

"I daresay Louis Gigue knows as much of you as most men do,"--she replied, quietly--"But I never speak of you to him. Indeed, I never speak of you at all unless you are spoken of, and not always then.

You do not interest me sufficiently!"

She moved towards the house. He followed her.

"Your remarks have been somewhat rambling and disjointed,"--he said- -"But essentially feminine, after all. And they merely tend to one thing--that you are still an untamed shrew!"

She looked back at him over her shoulder. Her eyes gleamed in the moonlight,--a faint smile curved her pretty mouth.

"If I am, it will need someone braver than you are to tame me!" she said--"A trickster is always a coward!"

With an angry exclamation he flung away the end of his cigar,--it fell into a harmless bed of mignonette and seared the sweet blossom, burning redly in the green like a wicked eye. And then he caught her hand firmly and held it grasped as in a vice.

"You insult me!" he said, thickly--"And I shall not forget it! You talk as a child talks--though you are no child! You are a woman of the world--you have travelled--you have had experience--and you know men. You are perfectly aware that the sentimental 'love' you speak of exists nowhere except in poems and story-books--you know that no sane man alive would tie himself to one woman save for the law's demand that his heirs shall be lawfully born. You are no shrinking maid in her teens, that you should start and recoil or blush, at the truth of the position, and it is the merest affectation on your part to talk about 'love lasting forever,' for you are perfectly aware that it cannot last very long over the honeymoon. The natural state of man is polygamous. Englishmen are the same as Turks or Hottentots in this respect, except for the saving grace of hypocrisy, which is the chief prop of European civilisation. If it were not for hypocrisy, we should all be savages as utterly and completely as in primaeval days! You know all this as well as I do--and yet you feign to desire the impossible, while all the time you play the fool with a country parson! But I'll make you pay for it--by Heaven, I will!

You scorn me and my name--you call me a social leper---"

"You are one!" she said, wrenching her hand from his clasp--"And what is more, you know it, and you glory in it! Who are your a.s.sociates? Men who are physically or morally degenerate--women who, so long as their appet.i.tes are satisfied, seek nothing more! You play the patron to a certain literary 'set' who produce books unfit to be read by any decent human being,--you work your way, by means of your t.i.tle and position, through society, contaminating everything you touch! You contaminate ME by a.s.sociating my name with yours!--and my aunt helps you in the wicked scheme! I came here to my own home--to the house where my father died--thinking that perhaps here at least I should find peace,"--and her voice shook as with tears--"that here, at least, the old walls might give me shelter and protection!--but even here you followed me with your paid spy, Marius Longford--and I have found myself surrounded by your base tools almost despite myself! But even if you try to hound me into my grave, I will never marry you! I would rather die a hundred times over than be your wife!"

His face flushed a dark red, and he suddenly made an though he would seize her in his arms. She retreated swiftly.

"Do not touch me!" she said, in a low, strained voice--"It will be the worse for you if you do!"

"The worse for me--or for YOU?" he muttered fiercely,--then regaining his composure, he burst into an angry laugh. "Bah! You are nothing but a woman! You fling aside what you have, and pine for what you have not! The old, old story! The eternal feminine!"

She made no reply, but moved on towards the house. "Quel raviss.e.m.e.nt de la lune!" exclaimed a deep guttural voice at this juncture, and Louis Gigue came out from the dark embrasure of the Manor's oaken portal into the full splendour of the moonlight--"Et la belle Mademoiselle Vancourt is ze adorable fantome of ze night!

Et milord Roxmouth ze what-you-call?--ze gnome!--ze shadow of ze lumiere! Ha-ha! C'est joli, zat little chanson of ze little rose- tree! Ze music, c'est une inspiration de Cicely--and ze words are not so melancolique as ze love-songs made ordinairement en Angleterre! Oui--oui!--c'est joli!"

He turned his shrewd old face up to the sky, and blinked at the dim stars,--there was a smile under his grizzled moustache. He had interrupted the conversation between his hostess and her objectionable wooer precisely at the right moment, and he knew it.

Roxmouth's pale face grew a shade paler, but he made a very good a.s.sumption of perfect composure, and taking out his case of cigars offered one to Gigue, who cheerfully accepted it. Then he lit one for himself with a hand that trembled slightly. Maryllia, pausing on the step of the porch as she was about to enter, turned her head back towards him for a moment.

"Are you staying long at Badsworth Hall?" she asked.

"About a fortnight or three weeks,"--he answered carelessly, "Mr.

Longford is doing some literary work and needs the quiet of the country--and Sir Morton Pippitt is good enough to wish us to extend our visit."

He smiled as he spoke. She said nothing further, but slowly pa.s.sed into the house. Gigue at once began to walk up and down the courtyard, smoking vigorously, and talking volubly concerning the future of his pupil Cicely Bourne, and the triumph she would make some two years hence as a 'prima donna a.s.soluta,' far greater than Patti ever was in her palmiest days,--and Roxmouth was perforce compelled, out of civility, as well as immediate diplomacy, to listen to him with some show of interest.

"Do you think an artistic career a good thing for a woman?" he asked, with a slight touch of satire in his voice as he put the question.

Gigue glanced up at him quickly and comprehendingly.

"Ah, bah! Pour une femme il n'y'a qu'une chose--l'Amour!" he replied--"Mais--au meme temps--l'Art c'est mieux qu'un mariage de convenance!"

Roxmouth shrugged his shoulders deprecatingly, smiled tolerantly, and changed the subject.

That same evening, when everyone had retired to bed, and when Mrs.

Bludlip Courtenay was carefully taking off her artistically woven 'real hair' eyebrows and putting them by in a box for the night, Lady Beaulyon, arrayed in a marvellous 'deshabille' of lace and pale blue satin, which would have been called by the up-to-date modiste 'a dream of cerulean sweetness,' came into her room with dejection visibly written on her photographically valuable features.

"It's all over, Pipkin!" she said, with a sigh,--Pipkin was the poetic pet-name by which the 'beauty' of the press-paragraphist addressed her Ever-Youthful friend,--"We shall never get a penny out of Mrs. Fred Vancourt. Maryllia is a mule! She has told me as plainly as politeness will allow her to do that she does not intend to know either you or me any more after we have left here--and you know we're off to-morrow. So to-morrow ends the acquaintance. That girl's 'cheek' is beyond words! One would think she was an empress, instead of being a little bounder with only an old Manor-house and certainly not more than two thousand a year in her own right!"

'Pipkin' stared. That she was dest.i.tute of eyebrows, save for a few iron-grey bristles where eyebrows should have been, and that her beautiful t.i.tian hair was lying dishevelled on her dressing table, were facts entirely lost sight of in the stupefaction of the moment.

"Maryllia Vancourt does not intend to know US!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed,-- "Nonsense, Eva! The girl must be mad!"

"Mad or sane, that's what she says,"--and Eva Beaulyon turned away from the spectacle of her semi-bald and eyebrow-less confidante with a species of sudden irritation and repulsion--"She declares we are in the pay of her aunt and Lord Roxmouth. So we are, more or less!

And what does it matter! Money must be had--and whatever way there is of getting it should be taken. I laughed at her, and told her quite frankly that I would do anything for money,--flatter a millionaire one day and cut him the next, if I could get cheques for doing both. How in the world should I get on without money?--or you either! But she is an incorrigible little idiot--talks about honour and principle exactly like some mediaeval story-book. She declares she will never speak to either of us again after we've gone away to- morrow. Of course we can easily reverse the position and turn the tables upon her by saying we will not speak to her again. That will be easy enough--for I believe she's after the parson."

Mrs. Bludlip Courtenay's eyes lightened with malignity.

"What, that man who objected to our smoke?"

Lady Beaulyon nodded.

"And I think Roxmouth sees it!"--she added.

'Pipkin' looked weirdly meditative and curiously wizened for a moment. Then she suddenly laughed and clapped her hands.

"That will do!" she exclaimed--"That's quite good enough for US!

Mrs. Fred will pay for THAT information! Don't you see?"

Lady Beaulyon shook her head.