Joan stood in the corridor, white, hardly breathing, as if turned to
stone, her beautiful eyes riveted on the spot where the man who was once
her lover had disappeared.
"Victor!" she thought, as her whole being seemed to writhe in an agony
of despair. "Victor--and in the duke's livery--am I mad?"
She gave a wild laugh, and the sudden sound startled her into sanity.
Numbness had followed the shock of seeing the man living, in the flesh,
whom she had hoped against hope was dead. Now she seemed to come to
life again. She clenched her nails into her gloved hands so vehemently
that the fine kid was rent. She suppressed her almost ungovernable
desire to groan out her misery, and as she set her teeth and closed her
eyes to realize the situation and deal with it, she seemed to see her
soul naked within her, and it was ablaze with one dominating passion
alone--love for Vansittart.
"I am all his," she slowly told herself. "How I have become so--I never
wished it--Nature, fate, the Creator who made us, alone, know. But I am
his, he is my lord and master, and whatever comes between me and him
must be trodden under foot!"
Her whole being, violently shocked and almost outraged by the sudden
blow, the reappearance of the unscrupulous man who had dared to annex
her fair young girlhood and chain it to his fouled existence, rose and
asserted itself in a strong, overpowering will--to belong to Vansittart,
its rightful owner by legitimate conquest, against all and every
obstacle. The feeling was so huge, so powerful, she felt as a very
feather in its grasp: she was awed by it, but strengthened.
"I will, I must be his, and I shall be!" she told herself, feeling as if
the words had uttered themselves prophetically, by some mysterious
agency, within her soul. And she quietly returned to the ballroom,
calmed; for she was as an almost automaton, swayed by some obsessive
spirit which had asserted itself when she was half wild with despair.
Entering the ballroom, she saw Vansittart, pale, his eyes laden with
emotion, watching for her just within the doorway. The heat, the buzz,
the patter of feet upon the parquet--they were dancing a cotillon--the
braying of the band, took her aback in her strained, nervous state for a
moment. Then she recovered herself and went up to him.
"Take me to auntie," she said, smiling up at him. "But first, one word!
Do I look ill? I feel so--I am subject to horrid neuralgia, and it has
just begun. I am distracted with pain! I shall be in bed all day
to-morrow, I am sure! Put off coming till the day after, won't you?"
Was it a dream, an illusion--her confiding, tender manner--that sweet
appealing look in those adored, beautiful eyes? Vansittart felt
suddenly weak and tremulous as he drew her hand within his arm. She
loved him! He was certain of it! She loved him! She had not known it
till he dared all in that passionate kiss. He vaguely felt himself the
Pygmalion who had awakened another Galatea.
"My darling, I am afraid it is my fault," he murmured in her ear, as he
conveyed her towards the corner where Lady Thorne sat patiently
listening to the prattle of the surrounding dowagers, and trying not to
wish the evening at an end. "How dear of you to to say 'No!' Of course
I will postpone coming. But I may call and enquire? No? Very well!
You have only to command me, my queen, my adored!"
Could it be real, that faint pressure of his arm, as he looked fondly
down upon that lovely little golden head? Vansittart almost lost his
grip upon himself, almost forgot to act the mere amiable cavalier, as he
accompanied Joan and her inwardly relieved and delighted aunt to the
cooler regions of the ducal establishment, and after vainly pressing
them to take some refreshment, found their carriage. As he stood
bareheaded under the awning after they had driven off, he glanced up at
the sky--it had been raining and now a wreath of cloud had parted to
disclose a misty moon--and a vague but real remorse that he had not kept
up with the noble truths he had learned at his dead mother's knee in
those days which seemed a century or more ago brought the moisture to
his happy eyes. "God forgive me, I do not deserve her!" was the honest
prayer which went up from his overladen heart as he turned, somewhat
giddily, and tried to walk into the ducal mansion without the
unsteadiness which might lead some of those priggish menservants to
imagine he had dined rather too well than wisely. "But, if I only can
succeed in making her my own, her life shall be a royal one!"
Would he have felt so triumphantly joyful if he could have seen his
beloved, after they parted?
Arrived at home, Joan dismissed her maid as soon as she could get rid of
her without exciting any suspicion, and spent a night's vigil in facing
the situation.
She remembered her innocent, ignorant schooldays--when, infected by the
foolish talk of frivolous elder girls--they were mostly daughters of
rich parents, Joan's godmother paid for the education which could not be
afforded by the poor clergyman and his invalid wife--she was flattered
by the admiring gaze of a handsome young man who watched her in church
each Sunday from his seat in a neighbouring pew. Schoolgirl talk of him
led to chance glances of hers in response. Then came a note artfully
dropped by him and picked up by a school friend, delighted to feel
herself one of the _dramatis personae_ in a living loveplay. This and
ensuing love-letters proved the young man a clever scribe. He
represented himself as a member of a distinguished family, banished from
home on account of his political opinions. The secret correspondence
continued; then, with the assistance of a bribed housemaid whose mental
pabulum was low class novelettes with impossible illustrations of seven
feet high countesses and their elongated curly-haired lovers, there were
brief, passionate meetings. When Joan was just recovering from her
grief at her father's recent death, the climax came. Her mother
died--her lawyers sent for her. When she returned to school, it was
with the knowledge that the rich uncle intended to take her from thence,
why and for what she did not know; that her godmother acknowledged his
right to deal with her future, and that her days in C---- were numbered.
With what agony and humiliation she remembered that next wildly
emotional meeting with the man she fancied she loved--his passionate
pleading that she would be his--her reluctant consent--their meeting in
town a few weeks later when she had boldly fled from school to her old
nurse in the little suburban house where she let lodgings, and their
marriage before the Registrar, to attain which Victor Mercier had
falsely stated her age, and their parting immediately after! She went
to her uncle somewhat in disgrace because of her precipitate flight from
school. But her beauty and the pathos of her orphanhood, also a secret
remorse on his part for his hardheartedness to her dead parents, induced
him to consider it a girlish freak alone, and to ignore it as such.
She had hardly become settled in her new, luxurious home when the blow
fell which at first seemed to shatter her whole life at once and for
ever. She read in a daily paper of a discovered fraud in the branch
office at C---- of a London house, and of the flight and disappearance
of the manager, Victor Mercier.
To recall those succeeding days and weeks of secret anguish, fear, dread
and sickening horror, made her shiver even now. In her desperation she
had confided in her old nurse. "But for her, I should have gone mad!"
she told herself, with a shudder.
"You will never see him again, my pretty; all you have to do is to
forget the brute!" was the burden of Nurse Todd's song of consolation.
"Such as him daren't ever show his face at Sir Thomas'! Your husbin'?
The law 'ud soon rid ye of a husbin' of his sort! But there won't be no
call for that! He's as dead as a doornail in this country--and, you're
not likely ever to see him again!"
And now he had come to life, and in the Duke's livery!
"He was one of the auxiliaries, of course!" Joan told herself. "But how
does he dare to be here? If only I had the courage to tell Uncle--all!
I believe he might forgive me. But I could never face Vansittart
again--if he knew! It would be giving up his love, and that--that I
will not do."
No, she must endure her second martyrdom in secret, as she endured the
first. There was nothing else to be done. And, she must become that
most subtle of all actresses--the actress in real life.
Morning came, and she declared herself too unwell with an attack of
neuralgia to rise. Her aunt came up and petted her, and she was left in
a darkened room until evening when she sat up for a little.
"You need not stay in to-night, Julie," she told her maid, a devoted, if
somewhat frivolous girl--her uncle and aunt, satisfied she was better,
had gone out to a dinner whither she should rightly have accompanied
them. "Tell them not to disturb me unless I ring. I shall go to bed
directly and get a long sleep." Julie left her, half reluctant, half
eager, for her evening out--lying cosily on a soft sofa, the last new
novel from the library open in her hands.
As soon as she considered that those among the servants who indulged in
surreptitious outings were clear of the premises, and the supper bell
had summoned the others to the favourite meal of the day, she rose,
dressed herself in a short cycling costume and a long cloak, tied a veil
over her smallest, plainest hat, took a latchkey she had once laughingly
stolen from her uncle, but had never yet used, and after locking her
door and pocketing the key, crept quietly downstairs, crossed the
deserted hall, and shut herself out into the warm, cloudy night.