Joan shuddered. To hear that fiat of her lover's--that only death or
the divorce court could free a girl in her position from that slight yet
deadly tie--and to hear it uttered with such seemingly heartless
barbarity--was almost too ghastly to be borne.
She hardly understood his last impassioned appeal to her to confide in
him--all--all that was troubling her. She stared miserably out upon the
river. A steam launch went puffing up stream. Some one on deck was
singing an apparently comic song to the strumming of a banjo; for shrill
feminine laughter, mingled with ironic "bravos" was borne upon the
breeze as the verse came to an end. Then the band engaged for the
afternoon struck up a bright little march on the lawn the other side of
the shrubbery. The mockery of the careless gaiety of ordinary life
jarred her beyond endurance.
"Let us go away from here," she exclaimed, starting up, and glancing
wildly at Vansittart.
His heart misgave him. This meant--he felt--that she was concealing
something from him. Well! he must have patience, and bide his time.
"Presently," he said, in tender, but authoritative tones--and he drew
her gently, but firmly, back on the seat by his side. "You must recover
yourself first, darling--telling me of this wretched affair of your
friend's has upset you! And really a girl who would be so reckless and
foolish as to damn her whole life in advance by linking it legally with
that of the first adventurer who came across her, is hardly worth your
sympathy, by the way! Come, cheer up, or people may, will think--well,
they will make a shrewd guess that there is something going on between
us, and you don't want that, do you?"
"Just now, I don't seem to care!" she replied--and her glance was one of
slight defiance. "You are too hard upon my poor friend--she was a dupe
rather than--what was it? 'reckless, foolish'!"
"I am afraid I must plead guilty to having scant sympathy with dupes,"
he said, somewhat slightingly. Her manner had hurt him unconscionably.
"I suppose that is why you fell in with my idea of making dupes of my
aunt and uncle!" She gave a shrill laugh, so unlike her ordinary sweet,
pleasant laugh--the laugh that had haunted him those lonely nights and
days in strange foreign lands, when he had striven to forget her--that
his temporary annoyance gave way to concern.
"That is hardly kind!" he exclaimed, reproachfully. "Remember, it was
not I who wished for this extraordinary secrecy! However, let that pass.
One of the things I brought you here to tell you, dearest, is that I
have hinted broadly to your uncle that I mean to make a dead set at you,
and conquer all your various objections to marriage--and that I have his
entire concurrence and sympathy! Is not that comforting?"
"It may be, to you," she said. "Honestly--dear"--she suddenly softened,
and gave him a pathetic, beseeching glance--"I am good for nothing
to-day--the past seems to have its clutch upon me, and I cannot feel
with the present, or believe in a future! You must have patience with
me----"
"You shall believe in a future, my angel!" he said emphatically--that
look had swept away the cobwebs of doubt and vague suspicion, and he was
once again the lover alone, as he drew her towards him and seemed to
devour her with his eyes. "Listen, dearest--you have only to fix any
day after a week is at an end, for our marriage, and the yacht will be
ready. It is looking delightful--and I have already stocked it with a
lot of things I think you will like. All I want now is one of your old
frocks--to have some made by the pattern--and just one little shoe and
glove"--he spoke hurriedly, somehow he shrank from such husband-like
allusions as irreverent until she was actually and irrevocably Lady
Vansittart--"may I, can I, have them, do you think? You see, I want you
to be thoroughly, completely comfortable! And I do not mean the yacht
to touch any port until we are absolutely compelled to--and then I shall
choose some little station where one could not get ladies' dresses and
things."
"How long shall we be able to wander without people knowing anything
about us?" she asked eagerly. He was pleased--reassured--to see how the
idea of a lengthy, secret honeymoon revivified her. She must love him!
How else should she wish to sail the oceans of the globe with him,
alone, as her companion?
"Dearest, that will be for you to say," he fondly returned, gazing
rapturously at the exquisite profile, waxen and delicate against the
drooping black feathers of her picture hat. If only the lines under
those beautiful eyes were less sharply defined, and the droop in those
soft, sweet lips less ominous of secret sorrow!
But, as he himself termed it, at that juncture in their _tete-a-tete_
Joan seemed to "take a favourable turn." First, seemingly roused from
her melancholy mood by talk of their approaching flight and consequent
life on the high seas, she became steadily brighter as the afternoon
progressed. Returning to the augmented crowd of Lady C----'s
fashionable guests, they mingled with the rest, Lord Vansittart behaving
with a decorous respect, and comporting himself admirably as a rejected
suitor returned to the fray. Only when, by Sir Thomas' special
invitation, he made one of the party on the coach, and throughout the
home-going sat as close into Joan's pocket as he dared, did he permit
himself to drop the carefully-assumed manner it had cost him such pains
to maintain.
But, later, he was rewarded. After dining with Joan and a few guests of
Sir Thomas', he spent a delightful half-hour with her on the balcony,
among the flowers under the awning. No one could see them from
below--opposite, the trees in the enclosure were dusky masses in the
starlight. The summer night seemed charged with love-murmurs--the
glittering heavens to twinkle joyously of the great emotion which
brought forth the Universe.
"Only a few days--and you will belong to me for ever!" he said,
rapturously. Almost as alone in their sought-for seclusion as if they
were already riding the waves of the southern seas in the ship that was
to see their first matrimonial bliss, he held her in his arms, and
tenderly, reverently--with almost the passionate devotion of an
anchorite kissing cherished relics--kissed her pale cheeks, her sweet
mouth, her beautiful, thoughtful brows. "Darling--I will make you forget
all your troubles--your self-reproach--everything that can possibly
detract from your happiness! I promise you I will! Do, do say that you
believe that I am capable of doing it!"
"If any one is, you are!" she murmured, clinging to him. "Somehow,
to-night, I feel happier than usual--as if life had something in it,
after all! And it is you who have made me cheer up--a few hours with
you has given me a certain confidence--or rather, I should say, a
hope--that perhaps the day may come when I shall be able to
forget--everything--but my life with you!"
"God grant it!" he piously exclaimed; and for that night at least his
prayer seemed answered--for after he and the other guests had departed,
Joan retired to her room and seeking her couch, slept more tranquilly
and dreamlessly than she had done since those evil days when Victor
Mercier cajoled her into marrying him--and when almost on the morrow,
she had learnt that her husband was an absconding criminal.
She awoke, too, with a new sense of safety--and of the very present
refuge in her trouble--Vansittart.
"Even if he got to know--he would not turn against me, I am sure he
would not!" she told herself, as she lay and thought of him, smiling.
For once she looked at peace and happy. "I feel it! How strange it
would be if it turned out that he would have to fight my battles with
uncle? But such things do happen--in real life as well as in fiction."
She lay and mused happily on the delightful subject--Vansittart, and the
coming days when they would be all in all to each other--until Julie
came with the hot water and the letters.
Then--it was as if death itself laid a cold hand on her heart--for there
was one in the detested writing of Victor Mercier. He had
dared--risked--writing to her openly in her own home, under her uncle's
roof!
What did it mean?