The King's Stratagem and Other Stories Part 6

"I was a fool, an idiot, an imbecile!" She nodded gravely, still regarding him from a great height. "I was mad to believe it possible!"

"I think we may be better friends," she responded, smiling faintly, yet with sudden good humor. "We are beginning to know--one another."

"And ourselves," almost under his breath. Then, "Miss Joan, will you ever forgive me? I shall never err again in that direction," he pleaded. "I am humiliated in my own eyes until you tell me it is forgotten."

She nodded, and this time with her own frank smile.

Then she turned away and did leave the room, this time taking Roy with her. Her joyous laughter and his wild, excited barking proclaimed through the length and breadth of Blore that he was enjoying the rare indulgence of a good romp on the back lawn. It was Roy's day.

And can a dog ever hope for a better day than that upon which his mistress becomes aware that she is also another's mistress: becomes aware that another is thinking of her and for her, nay, that she is the very center of that other's thoughts? What a charming, pleasantly bewildering discovery it is, this learning that for him when she is in the room it is full, and wanting her it is empty, be it never so crowded; that all beside, though they be witty or famous, or what they will, or can or would, are but lay figures, umbrae, shadow guests in his estimation. She learns with strange thrills, that in moments of meditation will flash to eye and cheek, that her slightest glance and every change of color, every tone and smile, are marked with jealous care; that pleasure which she does not share is tasteless, and a dinner of herbs, if she be but at a far corner, is a feast for princes. That is her dog's day, or it may be his dog's day. It is a pleasant discovery for a man, mutatis mutandis; but for a girl, a sweet, half fearful consciousness, the brightest part of love's young dream--even when the kindred soul is of another world, and an abyss, wide, impa.s.sable, unbridgeable lies between.

But these things come to sudden ends sometimes. Sprains, however severe, have an awkward knack of getting well. Swellings subside from inanition, and doctors insist for their credit's sake that the stick or ready arm be relinquished. Certainly a respite or a relapse--call it which you will--is not impossible with care, but it is brief. A singular shooting pain, not easily located with exactness, but somewhere in the neighborhood of the calf, has been found useful; and a strange rigidity of the tendon Achilles in certain positions may gain a day or two. But at last not even these will avail, and the doubly injured one must out and away from among the rose leaves. Twice Maitland fixed his departure for the following morning, and each time when pressed to stay gave way, after so feeble, so ludicrous a resistance, if it deserved the name, that Agnes scarcely concealed her grimace, and Joan looked another way. She did not add anything to the others' hospitable entreaties. If she guessed what made Maggie's good-night kiss so fervent and clinging, she made no sign and offered no opening.

In the garden next morning, Maitland taxed her with her neutrality. It was wonderful how his sense of humor had become developed at Blore.

"I thought that you did not need so much pressure as to necessitate more than four people's powers of persuasion being used," she answered, in the same playful spirit. "And besides, now you are well enough, must you not leave?"

"Indeed, Miss Joan?"

"And go back to your own way of life? It is a month since you saw the latest telegrams, and there is a French company at the Gaiety, I learn from the Standard. We have interests and duties, though you were so hard of belief about them, at Blore, but you have none."

"No interests?"

She shook her head. "No duties, at any rate."

"And so you think," he asked, his eyes fixed upon her changing features, "that I should go back to my old way of life--of a century ago?"

"Of course you must!" But she was not so rude as to tell him what a very foolish question this was. Still it was, was it not?

"So I will, or to something like it, and yet very unlike. But not alone. Joan, will you come with me? If I have known you but a month, I have learned to love your truth and goodness and you, Joan, so that if I go away alone, to return to the old life would be bitterly impossible. You have spoiled that; you must make for me a fresh life in its place. Do you remember you told me that when we knew one another we might be better friends? I have come to know you better, but we cannot be friends. We must be something more, more even than lovers, Joan--husband and wife, if you can like me enough."

It was not an unmanly way of putting it, and he was in earnest. But so quiet, so self-restrained was his manner that it savored of coldness. The girl whose hand he held while he spoke had no such thought. Her face was turned from him. She was gazing over the wall across the paddock where Maggie's mare was peaceably and audibly feeding, and so at the Blore Ash on its mimic hill, every bough and drooping branchlet dark against the sunset sky; and this radiant in her eyes with a beauty its deepest glow had never held for her before. The sweetest joy was in her heart, and grief in her face. He had been worthy of himself and her love. While he spoke she told herself, not that some time she might love him, but that she had given him all her true heart already. And yet as he was worthy, so she must be worthy and do her part.

"You have done me a great honor," she said at last, drawing away her hand from his grasp, though she did not turn her face, "but it cannot be, Mr. Maitland. I am very grateful to you--I am indeed, and sorry."

"Why can it not be?" he said shortly; startled, I am bound to say, and mortified.

"Because of--of many things. One is that I should not make you happy, nor you me. I am not suited to your way of life. I am of the country, and I love to be free and unconstrained, while you are of the town. Oh, we should not get on at all! Perhaps you would not be ashamed of me as your wife, but you might be, and I could not endure the chance even of it. There," she added, with a laugh in which a woman's ear might have detected the suppression of a sob, "is one sober reason where none can be needed."

"Is that your only reason?"

She was picking the mortar out of the wall. "Oh, dear me, no! I have a hundred, but that is a sufficient one," she answered almost carelessly, flirting a sc.r.a.p of lime from the wall with her forefinger.

"And you have been playing with me all this time!" cried he, obtusely enraged by her flippancy.

"Not knowingly, not knowingly, indeed!"

"Can you tell me that you were not aware that I loved you?"

"Well, I thought--the fact is, I thought that you were amusing yourself--in West End fas.h.i.+on."

"Coquette!"

"Mr. Maitland!" she cried vehemently, "how dare you? There is proof, if any were needed, that I am right. You would not have dared to say that to any of your town acquaintances. I am no coquette. If I have given you pain, I am very sorry. And--I beg that we may part friends."

She had begun fiercely, with all her old spirit. He turned away, and she ended with a sudden, anxious, pitiful lameness, that yet, so angry and dull of understanding was he, taught him nothing.

"Friends!" he cried impatiently. "I told you that it was impossible. Oh, Joan, think again! Have I been too hasty? Have I given you no time to weigh it? Have I just offended you in some little thing? Then let me come to you again in three months, after I have been back among my old friends?"

"No, don't do that, Mr. Maitland. It will be of no use and will but give us pain."

"And yet I will come," he replied firmly, endeavoring by the very eager longing of his own gaze to draw from her fair, downcast face some sign of hope. "I will come, if you forbid me a hundred times. And if you have been playing with me--true, I am in no mood for soft words now--it shall be your punishment to say me nay, again. I shall be here, Joan, to ask you in three months from to-day."

"I cannot prevent you," she said. "Believe me, I shall only have the same answer for you."

"I shall come," he said doggedly, and looked at her with eyes reluctant to quit her drooping lashes lest they should miss some glance bidding his heart take courage. But none came, only the color fluttered uncertainly in her face. So he slowly turned away from her at last and walked across the garden, and out of sight by the gate into the road. He saw nothing of the long, dusty track, and straggling hedges bathed in the last glows of sunset. Those big gray eyes, so frank and true, came again and again between him and the prospect, and blinded his own with a hot mist of sorrow and anger. Ah, Blore, thou wast mightily avenged!

It is a hot afternoon in August, laden with the hum of dozing life. The sun has driven the less energetic members of the Quaritch family into the cool gloom of the drawing room, where the open windows are shaded by the great cedar. Mrs. Quaritch, upon the sofa, is nodding over a book. Joan, in a low wicker seat, may be doing the same; while Agnes, pursuing a favorite employment upon the hearthrug, is now and again betrayed by a half stifled growl from one or other of the dogs as they rise and turn themselves reproachfully, and flop down again with a sigh in a cool place.

"Agnes," cries her mother, upon some more distinct demonstration of misery being made, "for goodness' sake leave the dogs alone. They have not had a moment's peace since lunch."

"A dog's life isn't peace, mamma," she answers, with the simple air of a discoverer of truth. But, nevertheless, she looks about for fresh worlds to conquer.

"Even Mr. Maitland was better than this," she announces, after a long yawn of discontent, "though he was dull enough, I wonder why he did not come in July. Do you know, Joan?"

"Oh, Agnes, do let us have a moment's peace for once! We are not dogs," cried Joan fretfully.

Wonder! she was always wondering. This very minute, while her eyes were on the page, it was in her mind. Through all those three months pa.s.sing hour by hour and day by day, she could a.s.sure herself that when he had come and gone, she would be at rest again; things would be as before with her. Let him come and go! But when July arrived, and he did not, a sharper pain made itself felt. Bravely as she strove to beat it down, well as she might hide it from others, the certainty that it had needed no second repulse to balk his love sorely hurt her pride. Just her pride, she told herself; nothing else. That he had not stood the test he had himself proposed; that any unacknowledged faintest hope she might have cherished, deep down in her heart, that he might master her by n.o.ble persistence, must now be utterly quenched; these things of course had no bitterness for her through the hot August days; had nothing to do with the wearied look that sometimes dulled the gray eyes, nor with the sudden indifference or as sudden enthusiasms for lawn tennis and dogs and pigeons, that marked her daily moods.

Agnes' teasing, by putting her meditations into words, has disturbed her. She gets up and moves restlessly about, touching this thing and that, and at last leaves the room and stands in the hall, thinking. Here, too, it is dark and cool, and made to seem more so--the door into the garden being open--by the hot glare of suns.h.i.+ne falling upon the spotless doorstep. She glances at this listlessly. The house is still, the servants are at the back; the dogs all worn out by the heat. Then, as she hesitates, a slight crunching of footsteps upon the gravel comes to her ear, breaking the silence. A sudden black shadow falls upon the sunny step and tells of a visitor. Someone chases away his shadow, and steps upon the stone, and raises his gloved hand to the bell. Charles Maitland at last!

Coming straight in from the suns.h.i.+ne he cannot see the swift welcome that springs to eye and cheek, a flash of light and color, quick to come and go. He is too much moved himself to mark how her hand shakes. He sees no difference in her. But she sees a change in him. She detects some subtle difference that eludes her attempt to define its nature and only fills her with a vague sense that this is not the Charles Maitland from whom she parted.

It is a meeting she has pictured often, but not at all like this. He signs to her to take him into the dining room, the door of which stands open.

"I have come back, Miss Joan."

"Yes?" she answers, sitting down with an attempt to still the tumult within, with such success that she brings herself for the moment nearly to the frame of mind in which they parted, and there is the same weary sufferance in her tone.

"I have come back as I said I would. I have overstepped the three months, but I had a good reason for my delay. Indeed I have been in doubt whether I ought to see you again at all, only I could not bear you to think what you naturally would. I felt that I must see you, even if it cost us both pain." There is a new awkwardness in his tone and pose.

"I told you that it was--quite unnecessary--and useless," she answers, with a strange tightening in her throat.

"Then it can do you no harm," he a.s.sents quietly. "I have come back not to repeat my pet.i.tion, but to tell you why I do not and cannot."

"I think," she puts in coldly, "that upon the whole you had better spare yourself the unpleasantness of explaining anything to me. Don't you think so? I asked you for no proof, and held out no hope. Why do you trouble me? Why have you come back?"

"You have not changed!"

For the first time a ring of contempt in her voice takes the place of cold indifference. "I do not change in three months, Mr. Maitland. But there! my mother will wish to see you, and so will Agnes, who is hankering after something to happen. They are in the drawing room."

"But, Miss Joan, grant me one moment! You have not heard my reasons."

"Your reasons! Is it absolutely necessary?" she asks, half fretfully, half scornfully; her uppermost thought an intense desire to be by herself in her own room, with the door safely locked.

"I think so, at any rate. Why, I see! By Jove! of course you must be thinking the worst of me now! Oh, no! if you could not love me, Joan--pray pardon me, I had no right to call you by your name--you need not despise me. I cannot again ask you to be my wife, because," he laughs uneasily, "fortune has put it out of my power to take a wife. My trustee has made ducks and drakes of my property, or rather bulls and bears. I have but a trifle left to begin the world upon, and far too little to marry upon."

"I read of it in the papers. I saw that a Mr. Maitland was the chief sufferer, but I did not connect him with you," she says, in a low voice.

"No, of course not. How should you?" he answers lightly. But nevertheless her coldness is dreadful to him. He had thought she would express some sympathy. And gayly as he talks of it, he feels something of the importance of a ruined man and something of his claim to pity.

"And what are you going to do?"

"Do? We've arranged all that. They say there is a living to be made at the Bar in New Zealand, if one does not object to riding boots and spurs as part of the professional costume. Of course it will be a different sort of life, and Agnes' favorite patent leathers will be left behind in every sense. This would have been a bad blow to me"--there is a slight catch in his voice, and he gets up, and looks out of one of the windows with his back to her--"now I have learned from you that life should not be all lounging round the table and looking over other people's cards. It has been a sharp lesson, but very opportune as things have turned out. I am ready to take a hand myself now--even without a partner."

He does not at once turn round. He had not fancied she would take it like this, and he listens for a word to tell him that at any rate she is sorry--is grieved as for a stranger. Then he feels a sudden light, timid touch upon his arm. Joan is standing quite close to him, and does not move or take away her hand as he turns. Only she looks down at the floor when she speaks: "I think I should be better than--than dummy--if you will take me to New Zealand."

Half laughing, half crying, and wholly confused, she looks up into his astonished face with eyes so brimful of love and tenderness that they tell all her story. For just an instant his eyes meet hers. Then, with a smothered exclamation, he draws her to him--and--in fact smothers the exclamation.

"I am so glad you've lost your money," she sobs, hiding her face, as soon as she can, upon his shoulder. "I should not have done at all--for you--in London, Charley."

There let us leave her. But no, another is less merciful. Neither of them hears the door open or sees Agnes' face appear at it. But she both sees and hears, and says very distinctly and clearly: "Well!"

But even Agnes is happy and satisfied. Something has happened.

THE FATAL LETTER.

I have friends who tell me that they seldom walk the streets of London without wondering what is pa.s.sing behind the house-fronts; without picturing a comedy here, a love-scene there, and behind the dingy cane blinds a something ill-defined, a something odd and bizarre. They experience--if you believe them--a sense of loneliness out in the street, an impatience of the sameness of all these many houses, their dull bricks and discreet windows, and a longing that someone would step out and ask them to enter and see the play.

Well, I have never felt any of these things; but as I was pa.s.sing through Fitzhardinge Square about half-past ten o'clock one evening in last July, after dining, if I remember rightly, in Baker Street, something happened to me which I fancy may be of interest to such people.

I was pa.s.sing through the square from north to south, and to avoid a small crowd, which some reception had drawn together, I left the pavement and struck across the road to the path around the oval garden; which, by the way, contains a few of the finest trees in London. This part was in deep shadow, so that when I presently emerged from it and recrossed the road to the pavement near the top of Fitzhardinge Street, I had an advantage over any persons on the pavement. They were under the lamps, while I, coming from beneath the trees, was almost invisible.

The door of the house immediately in front of me as I crossed was open, and an elderly man servant out of livery was standing at it, looking up and down the pavement by turns. It was his air of furtive anxiety that drew my attention to him. He was not like a man looking for a cab, or waiting for his sweetheart; and I had my eye upon him as I stepped upon the pavement before him. But my surprise was great when he uttered a low exclamation of dismay at sight of me, and made as if he would escape; while his face, in the full glare of the light, grew so pale and terror-stricken that he might before have been completely at his ease. I was astonished and instinctively stood still returning his gaze; for perhaps twenty seconds we remained so, he speechless, and his hands fallen by his side. Then, before I could move on, as I was in the act of doing, he cried, "Oh, Mr. George! Oh! Mr. George!" in a tone that rang out in the stillness rather as a wail than an ordinary cry.

My name, my surname, I mean, is George. For a moment I took the address to myself, forgetting that the man was a stranger, and my heart began to beat more quickly with fear of what might have happened. "What is it?" I exclaimed. "What is it?" and I shook back from the lower part of my face the silk m.u.f.fler I was wearing. The evening was close, but I had been suffering from a sore throat.

He came nearer and peered more closely at me, and I dismissed my fear; for I thought that I could see the discovery of his mistake dawning upon him. His pallid face, on which the pallor was the more noticeable as his plump features were those of a man with whom the world as a rule went well, regained some of its lost color, and a sigh of relief pa.s.sed his lips. But this feeling was only momentary. The joy of escape from whatever blow he had thought imminent gave place at once to his previous state of miserable expectancy of something or other.

"You took me for another person," I said, preparing to pa.s.s on. At that moment I could have sworn--I would have given one hundred to one twice over--that he was going to say yes. To my intense astonishment, he did not. With a very visible effort he said, "No."

"Eh! What?" I exclaimed. I had taken a step or two.

"No, sir."

"Then what is it?" I said. "What do you want, my good fellow?"

Watching his shuffling, indeterminate manner, I wondered if he were sane. His next answer rea.s.sured me on that point. There was an almost desperate deliberation about its manner. "My master wishes to see you, sir, if you will kindly walk in for five minutes," was what he said.

I should have replied, "Who is your master?" if I had been wise; or cried, "Nonsense!" and gone my way. But the mind, when it is spurred by a sudden emergency, often overruns the more obvious course to adopt a worse. It was possible that one of my intimates had taken the house, and said in his butler's presence that he wished to see me. Thinking of that I answered, "Are you sure of this? Have you not made a mistake, my man?"

With an obstinate sullenness that was new in him, he said, No he had not. Would I please to walk in? He stepped briskly forward as he spake, and induced me by a kind of gentle urgency to enter the house, taking from me, with the ease of a trained servant, my hat, coat, and m.u.f.fler. Finding himself in the course of his duties he gained more composure; while I, being thus treated, lost my sense of the strangeness of the proceeding, and only awoke to a full consciousness of my position when he had softly shut the door behind us and was in the act of putting up the chain.

Then I confess I looked round, a little alarmed at my precipitancy. But I found the hall s.p.a.cious, lofty, and dark-paneled, the ordinary hall of an old London house. The big fireplace was filled with plants in flower. There were rugs on the floor and a number of chairs with painted crests on the backs, and in a corner was an old sedan chair, its poles upright against the wall.

No other servants were visible, it is true. But apart from this all was in order, all was quiet, and any idea of violence was manifestly absurd.

At the same time the affair seemed of the strangest. Why should the butler in charge of a well-arranged and handsome house--the house of an ordinary wealthy gentleman--why should he loiter about the open doorway as if anxious to feel the presence of his kind? Why should he show such nervous excitement and terror as I had witnessed? Why should he introduce a stranger?

I had reached this point when he led the way upstairs. The staircase was wide, the steps were low and broad. On either side at the head of the flight stood a beautiful Venus of white Parian marble. They were not common reproductions, and I paused. I could see beyond them a Hercules and a Meleager of bronze, and delicately tinted draperies and ottomans that under the light of a silver hanging lamp--a gem from Malta--changed a mere lobby to a fairies' nook. The sight filled me with a certain suspicion; which was dispelled, however, when my hand rested for an instant upon the reddish pedestal that supported one of the statues. The cold touch of the marble was enough for me. The pillars were not of composite; of which they certainly would have consisted in a gaming house, or worse.

Three steps carried me across the lobby to a curtained doorway by which the servant was waiting. I saw that the "shakes" were upon him again. His impatience was so ill concealed that I was not surprised--though I was taken aback--when he dropped the mask altogether, and as I pa.s.sed him--it being now too late for me to retreat undiscovered, if the room were occupied--laid a trembling hand upon my arm and thrust his face close to mine. "Ask how he is! Say anything," he whispered, trembling, "no matter what, sir! Only, for the love of Heaven, stay five minutes!"

He gave me a gentle push forward as he spoke--pleasant, all this!--and announced in a loud, quavering voice, "Mr. George!" which was true enough. I found myself walking round a screen at the same time that something in the room, a long, dimly lighted room, fell with a brisk, rattling sound, and there was the scuffling noise of a person, still hidden from me by the screen, rising to his feet in haste.

Next moment I was face to face with two men. One, a handsome elderly gentleman, who wore gray mustaches and would have seemed in place at a service club, was still in his chair, regarding me with a perfectly calm, unmoved face, as if my entrance at that hour were the commonest incident of his life. The other had risen and stood looking at me askance. He was five-and-twenty years younger than his companion and as good-looking in a different way. But now his face was white and drawn, distorted by the same expression of terror--ay, and a darker and fiercer terror than that which I had already seen upon the servant's features; it was the face of one in a desperate strait. He looked as a man looks who has put all he has in the world upon an outsider--and done it twice. In that quiet drawing room by the side of his placid companion, with nothing whatever in their surroundings to account for his emotion, his panic-stricken face shocked me inexpressibly.

They were in evening dress; and between them was a chess table, its men in disorder: almost touching this was another small table bearing a tray of Apollinaris water and spirits. On this the young man was resting one hand as if, but for its support, he would have fallen.

To add one more fact, I had never seen either of them in my life.

Or wait; could that be true? If so, it must indeed have been a nightmare I was suffering. For the elder man broke the silence by addressing me in a quiet, ordinary tone that exactly matched his face. "Sit down, George," he said, "don't stand there. I did not expect you this evening." He held out his hand, without rising from his chair, and I advanced and shook it in silence. "I thought you were in Liverpool. How are you?" he continued.

"Very well, I thank you," I muttered mechanically.

"Not very well, I should say," he retorted. "You are as hoa.r.s.e as a raven. You have a bad cold at best. It is nothing worse, my boy, is it?" with anxiety.

"No, a throat cough; nothing else," I murmured, resigning myself to this astonis.h.i.+ng reception--this evident concern for my welfare on the part of a man whom I had never seen in my life.

"That is well!" he answered cheerily. Not only did my presence cause him no surprise. It gave him, without doubt, actual pleasure!

It was otherwise with his companion; grimly and painfully so indeed. He had made no advances to me, spoken no word, scarcely altered his position. His eyes he had never taken from me. Yet in him there was a change. He had discovered, exactly as had the butler before him, his mistake. The sickly terror was gone from his face, and a half-frightened malevolence, not much more pleasant to witness, had taken its place. Why this did not break out in any active form was part of the general mystery given to me to solve. I could only surmise from glances which he later cast from time to time toward the door, and from the occasional faint creaking of a board in that direction, that his self-restraint had to do with my friend the butler. The inconsequences of dreamland ran through it all: why the elder man remained in error; why the younger with that pa.s.sion on his face was tongue-tied; why the great house was so still; why the servant should have mixed me up with this business at all--these were questions as unanswerable, one as the other.

And the fog in my mind grew denser when the old gentleman turned from me as if my presence were a usual thing, and rapped the table before him impatiently. "Now, Gerald!" cried he, in sharp tones, "have you put those pieces back? Good Heavens! I am glad that I have not nerves like yours! Don't you remember the squares, boy? Here, give them to me!" With a hasty gesture of his hand, something like a mesmeric pa.s.s over the board, he set down the half dozen pieces with a rapid tap! tap! tap! which made it abundantly clear that he, at any rate, had no doubt of their former positions.

"You will not mind sitting by until we have finished the game?" he continued, speaking to me, and in a voice I fancied more genial than that which he had used to Gerald. "You are anxious to talk to me about your letter, George?" he went on when I did not answer. "The fact is that I have not read the inclosure. Barnes, as usual, read the outer letter to me, in which you said the matter was private and of grave importance; and I intended to go to Laura to-morrow, as you suggested, and get her to read the news to me. Now you have returned so soon, I am glad that I did not trouble her."

"Just so, sir," I said, listening with all my ears; and wondering.

"Well, I hope there is nothing very bad the matter, my boy?" he replied. "However--Gerald! it is your move! ten minutes more of such play as your brother's, and I shall be at your service."