THE SEVERING OF THE HAIR.
The storm which had swept unheeded over the heads bent over the
gaming-tables at the Kursaal that wild autumn night, was hardly wilder
and fiercer than the tempest in Stewart Routh's soul, as he, making
one of the number of the gamblers, played with a quite unaccustomed
recklessness, and won with surprising sequence. This was earlier in
the night, when the powers of the air were only marshalling their
forces, and the elemental war had not extended beyond the skirmishing
stage. Many times he looked impatiently round, even while the ball was
rolling, as if expecting to see some one, who still did not appear;
then he would turn again to the green board, again stake and win, and
resume his watch. At length a touch on his elbow caused him to look
round in a contrary direction, where he saw a man standing, who
immediately handed him a note and went away. Then Routh smiled, read
the words the note contained, smiled again, swept up the money which
lay before him, and left the room. The battle had fairly begun as he
stepped out from the shelter of the portico, and, buttoning his coat
tightly across his chest, and pulling his hat down to his eyebrows,
set himself, with bent head, against the storm. His way led him past
his own lodgings, and as he took it on the opposite side of the
street, he saw, indistinctly, Harriet's figure, as she sat close
beside the window, her head against the panes. Something dreary and
forsaken in the aspect of the window, with its flimsy curtains wide
apart, the indistinct form close against the glass, no light within
the room, made Routh shiver impatiently as he looked at it; and just
then the light in the street flickered and swerved violently under the
influence of a sudden blast, which drove a sharp cascade of rain
rattling against the window.
"Moping there in the dark," said Routh, with an oath, "and making
things a hundred times worse, with her cursed whining and temper."
The Schwarzchild mansion was near, and he was soon removed as far from
all associations with discomfort and dreariness as brilliant light, a
blazing fire of odorous wood burning in a room too large to be
overheated by it, luxurious surroundings, and pleasant expectation
could remove him from such discordant realities. Presently Mrs. Ireton
P. Bembridge made her appearance. The room was a long one, and she
entered by a door which faced the chimney where he was standing. Much
as he had admired her, irresistibly as her beauty had captivated him
with its ordinary charm, of recklessness and lustre, with its rare,
far-between moments of softness and grace, he had never really
understood until now how beautiful she was. For there was a mingling
of both moods upon her as she came towards him, her amber silk dress,
with the accustomed drapery of superb black lace falling round her,
and sweeping the ground in folds such as surely no other mere gown,
made by mundane milliner, had ever accomplished. Rich purple amethysts
were on her neck and on her wrists, and gleamed on the comb which held
the coils of her hair. Wax-lights in profusion shed their softened
light upon her, upon the cream and rose tints of her brow and cheeks,
upon the scarlet of her lips, upon the marvellous darkness of her
eyes; and the capricious blaze from the burning logs shot quivering
streaks of light among the folds of her dress, glancing over the
jewels she wore, and playing redly on the hand which she held out,
while yet some steps divided her from Routh, gazing at her in
absorbed, almost amazed admiration.
"How tired and pale you look!" she said, as he took the proffered
hand, and she allowed him to hold it. The words were slowly spoken, in
the tone of solicitude for him, which is one of the most potent
weapons in a beautiful woman's armoury. "Sit there," she went on,
drawing her hand gently from his hold and indicating a seat, while she
settled herself into the recesses of a huge German sofa. "How could
you imagine I would go to the Kursaal to-night? Just listen!" She held
her hand up; a cloud of filmy lace fell back from the beautiful round
white arm. Then she dropped the hand slowly, and waited for him to
speak. He spoke with strange difficulty; the spell of the power of her
beauty was upon him. This was not what he had intended. He had meant
to conquer, not to be conquered; to sway, not to be ruled.
"I thought," he said, in a low tone, "you would have come,
because--I--I did not know you would allow me the happiness of coming
here."
"Did you not? I think you don't understand me yet. I wished to see
you, you know, and I did not wish to go out this evening. It is quite
simple, is it not?"
"It is indeed, for such a woman as you."
She laughed.
"Is not that rather an awkward speech--rather an equivocal compliment?
How _posed_ you look!"
She laughed again, Routh felt unspeakably embarrassed; he had a sense
of being at a disadvantage, which was unpleasant. She saw it, and
said:
"What a temper you have! You'd be rather hard to please, I fancy, if
one were in any sense bound to try."
"Don't jest with me," said Routh, suddenly and sternly, and he rolled
his chair deliberately near her as he spoke. "You did not allow me,
you did not invite me to come here to-night; you did not do this,
which seems so 'simple' to you, because you are as much braver than
every other woman as you are more beautiful,"--he looked into her dark
eyes, and their lids did not droop,--"only to jest with me, only to
trifle with me, as you trifle with others. You are a wonderfully
puzzling woman, I acknowledge; no woman ever so puzzled me before.
Each time I see you, there is something different, something new in
your manner, and each time it is as though I had to begin all over
again; as if I had not told you that I love you, as if you had not
listened and confessed that you know it. Why have you sent for me? You
dismissed me yesterday with something which you tried to make look and
sound like anger--ineffectually, for you were not angry. And I was
prepared for the same line of tactics to-day. Well, you send for me. I
am here. You come to me a thousand times more beautiful"--he dropped
his voice to a whisper, and she grew pale under the fixed fire of his
eyes,--"infinitely more beautiful than I have ever seen you; and in
your eyes and in your smile there is what I have never seen in them;
and yet you meet me with mere jesting words. Now, this you do not
mean; what is it that you _do_ mean?"
He rose, and leaned against the mantelpiece, looking down upon her
bent head, with the light shining on the jewels in her hair. She did
not speak.
"What is that you _do_ mean?" he repeated. She had laid one arm along
the cushioned side of the sofa, the side near him. He clasped it,
above the wrist, impressively, not caressingly, and at the touch, the
words he had spoken to her before, "Would you not be afraid of a man
who loved you with all the passion of his heart?" recurred to her, and
she felt that so this man loved her, and that she was afraid of him.
"I dare say many others have loved you, and told you so," he
continued, "and I don't ask you how you received their professions. I
know the world too well, and what it brings to men and women, for any
such folly. That is of the past. The present is ours. I ask you why
you have brought me here? A woman who resents such words as those I
have spoken to you before now, does not give a man the chance of
repeating them. You have not sent for me to tell me that you are
insulted and outraged, to talk the cant of a hypocritical society to
me. I should not love you, beautiful as you are, if you were such a
fool."
He saw that his audacity was not without its charm for her; her head
was raised now, and her dark eyes, looking up, met his looking down,
as she listened, with parted lips and deep-drawn breath.
"Be sure of this," he said, "no man has ever loved you as I love you,
or been willing to stake so much upon your love." The sinister truth
which lurked in these words lent the sinister expression to his face
again for a moment which she had sometimes seen in it. "How much I
stake upon it you will never know. So be it. I am ready, I am willing.
You see I am giving you time. I am not hurrying you into rash speech.
I dare say you were not at all prepared for this when you and I met,
and you took the initiative in what you intended to be an ordinary
watering-place flirtation--while you were waiting for Arthur Felton,
perhaps?" he said, savagely, for, as he went on, the savage nature of
the man was rising within him, and for all that his grasp was on her
soft white arm, and his gaze was searching the depths of her dark
eyes, he was speaking rather to himself than to her; rather to the
unchained devil within, than to the beautiful fatality before him.
"It is possible you had some such notion," he said. "I don't ask you
to acknowledge it, for if so, you have abandoned it." He stooped
lower, his eyes looked closer into hers. She shrank back, and covered
her face with her disengaged hand. "Yes," he went on, in a gentle
tone, "I know you soon discovered that I am not made for make-believes;
and now--now that you have sent for me, and I am here, what is it
that you mean? You _cannot_ make me the pastime of an hour; you
_cannot_ shake off the hold which such love as mine lays upon your
life--would still lay upon it were you a feebler woman than you are.
What then? Are you going to take the wine of life, or are you going to
content yourself with the vapid draughts you have hitherto drank? You
must tell me, and tell me to-night, what it is you mean; for a crisis
in my life is come, and I must know, without paltering or delay, how
it is to be dealt with."
He lifted his hand from her arm, and standing directly before her,
bade her look up and speak to him. She did not move. Then he sat down
on a velvet footstool before her sofa, and drew her hands away from
before her face. There were signs of agitation on it, and he read
them, not quite correctly perhaps, but to his own satisfaction.
"Listen to me," he said, in the gentlest tones within the compass of
his voice. "I have a right--have I not?--to ask you, to know what is
your meaning towards me? What did you bring me here for? Remember the
words I have spoken to you, not once only, or twice; remember the
story I told you on the balcony yonder; remember the tone you have
occasionally adopted in all your levity, and then do not attempt to
deny my right to speak as I am speaking, and to demand your answer."
"You--you found me alone here--in my own house--and--"
"Absurd!" he cried. "You are talking nonsense, and you know it. Did
you not intend me to understand that I should find you alone? Did your
note, your summons (I tore it up, but you remember the words as well
as I do), mean anything else? Do you not know this is all folly? There
is no need to play with _me_. I am a sure prize or victim, which you
please; you know that well enough, and I must know which you _do_
please, for this is, as I said before, a crisis for me. Which is it?"
he said, and he held her hands more tightly, and looked at her with a
pale face. "Which is it? Mere coquetry--a dangerous game with a man
like me I warn you--a game you won't find it possible to play; or--or
the deep, deep love of a lifetime--the devotion which will never
swerve or falter--the passion which will blot out from your knowledge
or your fears everything beyond itself."
Weak, imaginative, without principle, easily ruled by strength, though
a despot to weakness, the woman he addressed listened to him like one
in a dream. Not until afterwards did a sense of being tricked and
trapped come to her. Had her demeanour towards Routh really implied
all this! Had she yielded to the rapacity for admiration, to the
thirst for conquest, which had always dominated in her nature, once
too often, and far too completely? This was precisely what she had
done, and she had fallen into the hands of a stronger being than
herself. In a blind, vague, groping kind of way she felt this, and
felt that she could not help or deliver herself, and felt it with
something like fear, even while her imagination and her vanity were
intoxicated by the mingling of defiance and pleading in his words, in
his tones, and in his looks.
"You and I," he went on, "would say to others, would say to each other
in some of our moods, or would have said when first we met, that no
such thing as this all-sufficing love exists, but each of us knows
well that it does, and may and _shall_ be ours! This is what _I_ mean.
Again I ask you, what is _your_ meaning in all this?"
"I don't know," she replied, releasing her hands, and rising. He
allowed her to pass him, and to walk to the fireplace. She stood
there, her radiant figure glittering in the lustre of the fire and the
wax-lights. She stood there, her head bent, her hands before her, the
fingers interlaced. After a minute, Routh followed her, and stood
before her.
"Then you will not answer me--you will not tell me what your meaning
was in sending for me to-night?"
There was tenderness in his tone now, and the slight inflection of a
sense of injury which rarely fails with a woman.
"Yes," she said, looking up full at him, "I will tell you. I wanted to
let you know that I think of going away."
"Going away!" cried Routh, in unbounded amazement--"Going away! What
do you mean?"
"Just what I say," she replied, recovering herself, and resuming her
usual tone and manner as soon as he released her from the spell of his
earnestness and passion--"I am going away. I don't treat you quite so
badly as you try to make out, you see, or I should not tell you about
it, or consult you, or anything, but just go--go right away, you know,
and make an end of it."
Routh's stern face flushed, and then darkened with a look which
Harriet had learned to know, but which Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge had
never seen. She did not see it now, and continued:
"I sent for you to tell you this. I don't like the place; I'm tired of
it. It's too small, and yet every one comes here, and I'm talked of.
Ah, you sneer! Well, I know. I remember all I have said about that,
but it is one thing to be talked of in London or Paris, and quite
another to be the object of the daily curiosity and the malice--"
"You mean the envy, don't you?"
"No, I don't, I mean the malice; well the envy, or the malice, or only
the observation, if you like, of always the same people, whom I meet
in always the same places. This is a part of my reason, but only a
part. I don't like Mr. Felton, I don't like Mr. Dallas; less than any
people in the world I choose to have them to spy and overlook me;
and--and--I don't want to be here when that man comes."
Routh stood before her quite silent.
"You know--you remember," she said with a smile, "Arthur Felton.
By-the-by, you need not make faces about my wearing his photograph any
more, for I've lost it--lost it before I got home yesterday. In fact,
I suspect he is in some trouble--perhaps in some disgrace--and I have
no fancy for being here when he arrives, to have him quarrelling with
me if I avoid him, and his father regarding me with horror if I don't;
so--" and here she knelt on the white rug and stretched out her hands
to the fire, which shone reflected in her upraised eyes--"so I am
going to--" She paused, tantalizing him.
"To--?" he repeated after her, almost in a whisper.
"To London," she said; and laughed and looked at him, and rose. "Now
sit down, and let us talk it over, and be reasonable."
Still quite silent, Routh obeyed her. His manner, his look was
changed. He was thoughtful; but an air of relief had come upon him, as
if unexpected help had reached him from an unforeseen quarter.
There was no light in the window, as Routh passed it by, returning to
his lodgings. But there was a lamp in the hall, at which he lighted a
candle, and went into the sitting-room.
Harriet was still sitting by the window; she did not raise or turn her
head, and Routh thought she was sleeping. He went up close to her, and
then she languidly opened her eyes and rose.
"Have you fallen asleep here, in the dark, Harriet?" said Routh, "and
without a fire! How imprudent and unnecessary!"
"I am not cold," she said; but she shivered slightly as she spoke.
Routh took up a shawl which lay upon a chair and wrapped it round her.
She looked at him, quietly but sharply.
"Don't be afraid; I am all right to-night, Harry," he said. "I've won
a lot of money at the tables, and I've been thinking over what we were
saying this morning--" He paused a moment, and then went on with some
constraint in his voice: "I think you are right so far, that the
sooner we get away from this the better. I will consider the rest of
the matter when we get to London."
Harriet looked at him still, closely and sharply, but she said
nothing.
"You are too tired to talk about anything to-night, Harry, I see,"
said Routh, with good humour which did not sit on him very naturally,
"so we will not talk. But would it be possible for you to be ready to
start in the morning?"
"Yes," said Harriet, quietly, and without showing the least surprise
by voice or countenance, "I will have everything ready."
Homburg von der Höhe was graced for only a few days longer by the
beautiful American. Her pony-carriage and the gray ponies, the French
groom, the luxurious wrappings, the splendid vision of satin, and
lace, and jewels, all disappeared, and the Schwarzchild mansion was
for a while desolate, until again occupied by the numerous progeny of
a rich and rusty Queen's counsel.
It was understood that Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge had returned to Paris.
"Every season is the right season for Paris with those Americans,"
said a contemptuous Briton, who secretly held himself aggrieved by the
abrupt departure of the handsome widow, who had never appeared more
than conscious of his existence, certainly not interested in the fact;
"it draws them like a loadstone."
"She has evidently heard nothing of Arthur," said Mr. Felton to his
nephew, "or she would have sent us word."
He spoke timidly, and glanced at George with anxious eyes. George
looked undisguisedly serious and troubled.
"I wish your letters had arrived, uncle," he replied. "I begin to fear
we shall not see Arthur here; and--and to be sorry that so much time
has been lost."
A week later George Dallas wrote to Harriet Routh from Paris as
follows:
"Hôtel du Louvre, Paris, October.
"My Dear Mrs. Routh,--I am here with my uncle. My mother and Mr.
Carruthers are travelling more slowly. We are all to meet in London.
Meantime a circumstance has occurred which may prove of great, and
must be of some, importance to Mr. Felton and to myself. I am
compelled to ask your assistance, which I know you will give me with
all your accustomed readiness and kindness.
"Accompanied by my uncle, I went this morning to a jeweller's shop in
the Rue de la Paix to order the bracelet you know of to be re-made for
my mother. I had not previously undone the packet containing the gold
band and the turquoises, which you sealed up and kept in your desk for
me, since the day you gave it to me at Homburg. The things were
wrapped up in letter-paper, you will remember. I opened the packet on
the counter of the jeweller's shop, shook the turquoises into a box he
handed me for the purpose, and was holding up the gold band for him to
examine, when my uncle, who was looking at the paper I had laid down,
suddenly called to me, and pointing to some writing on it--mere
memoranda, apparently, of articles to be purchased (I enclose a
correct copy)--exclaimed, 'That is Arthur's writing!' I saw at once
that it was his writing, and determined to apply to you in the first
place for information on the matter. It is now clear that my cousin
has passed under another name than his own, and that Routh and perhaps
you have known him. There is a date, too, upon the paper--10th of
April of this year. You took the paper out of the lower division of
your desk. You may be able to tell us all that we have so long been
anxious to know, at once. Pray answer this without delay. I think it
best not to write to Routh, because my uncle and he are almost
strangers, and also, dear Mrs. Routh, because it comes naturally to me
to address myself to you. How strange that all this time you and Routh
should have known Arthur, and I, living in intimacy with you both,
should have been in a manner seeking him! You will, no doubt, be able
to tell us everything without an hour's delay; but, in any case, we
shall be in London in a week, and shall have Arthur's portrait to show
you. I am sure this letter is very ill expressed, but I am still
bewildered at the strangeness of the occurrence. Write at once. My
room is No. 80.
"Always yours affectionately,
"George Dallas.
"P. S. The jeweller of the Rue de la Paix is a jewel among his tribe.
He undertakes to replace the diamonds, and, as far as I can judge--to
be sure it's only a little way--with stones just as fine as those I
sold at A--, for a third less than the money his Hebrew Dutch
_confrère_ gave me. I had a mind to tell him the value of the original
diamonds, but I didn't--the honestest of the jewellers is only human,
and it might tempt him to raise the price and not the value. But I
think he recognized a master-mind in my uncle."