THE TRAGEDY ON THE POLO GROUNDS.
It was, after all, by no woman’s wile that Christina brought Valentine
Ambleton to Sunstead once again.
While she was spending her days in fretting over her fate, and chafing
sorely at the failure of her scheme to force the man she called her
enemy to become her friend, destiny—a sad and tragic destiny—hastened
this period of inactivity to a close.
One hot summer evening, weeks after Grace’s departure from Dynechester,
her butler sought Lady Wentworth as she sat listlessly on the lawn
alone, and informed her that Mr. Ambleton desired to see her. Christina
was wide awake in an instant; she looked at the servant incredulously.
“Mr. Sacha Ambleton, I suppose you mean. Tell him to come to me out
here.”
“No, my lady, not Mr. Sacha, but Mr. Ambleton,” the man answered.
Christina rose to her feet, and then sank back in her chair again, the
folds of her soft diaphanous black gown falling gracefully about her.
“Ah!” she said, quietly enough, though her pulses were beating rapidly,
“ah! just so. Well, I will see Mr. Ambleton out here. Tell him to come
through the conservatory, and, James, bring coffee and some cigars.”
She sat and watched for Valentine to appear through the open doorway of
the conservatory.
She did not trouble herself very much to question why he should
suddenly pay her this visit; it was enough for her that he had come.
Valentine emerged from the house onto the lawn; he walked deliberately.
He was glancing about him in a sorrowful sort of way.
It was some time since he had been at Sunstead; the place had a
pathetically familiar air to him, and brought back hosts of memories,
memories of the days when Mark had scampered and jumped about the
grounds a merry little lad in a brown holland smock, and Sacha and
Grace had played with him, and driven the old head gardener wild with
terror at their antics. And now——
Christina, as she rose to greet him, saw that his face was pale, and
his eyes wet.
“You have come to tell me something disagreeable,” she said; she
trembled a little, and did not hold out her hand, and perhaps for the
first time in her life, she completely forgot herself for the space of
a moment.
Her voice, her words had something childlike in them, and as Valentine
saw that she trembled, he immediately felt some pity steal out toward
her.
“I have come to fetch you,” he said, simply and very gently. “Mark
wants you.”
“Where is he?” Christina’s hands were held tightly together, and a
different emotion swept over her.
She guessed his mission now, and she resented it sharply, for she knew,
only too well, what the material significance of this mission meant to
her henceforward.
“Is he ill?” she queried on, and her voice was clear and hard. “What
has happened? Please do not give me your news in little bits, Mr.
Ambleton; I prefer it all at once.”
“Mark has had an accident; he is very ill.”
“Will he die?” asked Christina.
For the second time something childlike stole over her. She was, after
all, very young, and whatever her faults had been, she was now face to
face with tragedy, and Valentine remembered this, and remembered her
youth, and in this moment he was very near to forgiving her her faults.
He answered her in the same simple way.
“You must try not to look for the worst. Mark is young. We must hope.”
“What has happened?” Christina asked again.
And he told her tersely the story of that same day; how Sir Mark, it
seemed, had gone to some club grounds near London to play a game of
polo with one or two of his friends, in order to try a pony he had just
bought, and how he had been unfortunately struck on the head in a close
scrimmage, and been thrown and dragged, the pony taking fright, and
racing off with its senseless burden a considerable distance before it
could be stopped.
“Mark lies at the clubhouse. He has had every attention, and three
doctors have seen him. Happily his companions thought of sending to us,
and I have hastened to you without loss of an hour. I thought I might
tell this better than any written message, but I am clumsy at this sort
of work. You must forgive me. I hoped to have softened things a little.”
“I am no coward,” Christina said. Her brain was revolving rapidly. She
knew that her husband would die, perhaps he was already dead. This gave
her no heartache, since for many a week now she realized that she hated
this man she had married, hated him thoroughly. But death robbed her of
more than a husband. It took from her power and wealth, and worse than
this, it restored to those whom she had dominated, all that had once
been theirs, morally, if not actually.
With Sir Mark’s death his title would die, as he left no son, and there
was no other heir, and with his death Sunstead and all its domains
would pass to his Cousin Valentine, eldest son of his father’s sister.
This was something that Christina had always known, something she had
always hated to know, because in her imagination it was a prospect that
could give to Valentine’s sister all that Christina desired to take
from her.
Up to that time, too, when other feelings had begun to dawn in her
thoughts of Valentine himself, she had given him an equal share of
resentment with Grace; but by degrees this resentment had gone, and now
as Christina stood in the summer twilight beside his tall form, she
remembered only that she would be free, possibly was already free, and
that this man about whom she had dreamed and pondered so much, would be
master in her husband’s place, and that, as such, was more desirable to
her in every respect.
The memory of what Sacha had said about Polly’s attraction for
Valentine came back to sting her; but Christina put the sting aside.
Would it be possible for Polly or any other woman to stand against her?
True, Valentine had given her no right to imagine he was conquerable,
but then Christina had not been placed as she would be placed in the
future.
A wife and a widow were two widely different creatures in the moral
philosophy of such a man as Valentine, and Christina fell back on
the only salve she had been able to find during these past weeks for
her vanity, the certainty that had she been unmarried she would have
brought Valentine to her feet whenever she had desired.
The easy complacency with which Sacha had tried to embark on a
flirtation with her had but emphasized the deliberation of Valentine
never to approach her.
This had been her one touch of self-satisfaction and consolation, and
the fact that Valentine should have set aside all his rules and have
hastened to be with her on this particular evening, framed itself in
Christina’s wholly selfish mind now as meaning everything that it did
not mean.
She cast her thoughts far ahead in this moment, and she instantly set
herself a rôle to play now and in the immediate future.
“I will go with you,” she said, in a low, troubled sort of way. “Of
course I will go, if you tell me poor Mark really wants me; but——”
She paused. “But,” she went on, more hurriedly, “he has not wanted me
much of late; he has made his life so far apart from me—it is only
natural I should hesitate lest I make a mistake now.”
“There can never be a mistake in being generous under certain
circumstances,” Valentine said, gently.
He did not tell her that poor Mark would not know she had gone to him,
that all chance of recognition was over.
He hastened her a little in her preparations, however, for they had
a journey before them, and he, for his own part, sorely desired to
whisper a loving word to his cousin before the end came.
Somehow or other, almost against himself, Valentine found a sort of
tenderness mingle in with his pity for Christina. He was so truly
soft-hearted where women were concerned, and Christina appealed to him
this night.
She was no longer the brilliant, imperious beauty; she was very young,
very unhappy and very pathetic.
She did not shed tears, her emotion seemed too great for any such
outlet; she sat very still all the way to town, and her face grew tired
and pale as the journey came slowly to an end.
In her black garments—the simplest her wardrobe could produce—there
was an air of affinity with that dear, slender girl, whose wonderful
eyes, and fresh voice haunted him all the time, and anything that could
even suggest Polly to him was dear to Valentine.
He was, therefore, tenderness itself to Mark’s wife. No one seeing them
together, and noting this tenderness, would have believed that, up to
a few hours before, this had been to him a woman he had despised and
almost hated.
There was not a trace of the worldling or the courtier about Valentine.
He was absolutely sincere, and just as he had held anger and contempt
in his heart for Christina in the year that was gone, so now he put
aside those harsh feelings and gave her pity in all sincerity.
She touched him sharply, and once she brought the color flashing
half-shamedly into his face. It was when she spoke of the past.
“Ah!” Christina had said, breaking a long, long silence suddenly; “ah!
how right you were! How right! and how wrong I have been! No wonder you
have hated me so dreadfully all this time, but you did not know how
you hurt me, did you? And you could not know, either, that I regretted
my willfulness immediately. But I tried to do my best, indeed I did,
Valentine. Please always remember this, that I did care for Mark, and I
would have cared more and more if—if only he had let me. It was a big
mistake, and you were right. I have wanted to say this to you ever so
many times, but you would never give me the chance!”
“You must not fret about these things, now,” Valentine said, soothingly.
Her distress was so real to him he felt as though he were in close
contact with an aching human heart, a heart suddenly charged with the
sorrow of a folly, worked into a tragedy.
This was about all Christina did say on that long, long journey. She
was content to sit in her corner of the railway carriage and feel
herself watched over and tended by this man, whose allegiance she had
craved for so sharply, and who had seemed so far away.
To Valentine it was a torture each time the slow train was brought
to anchor at some small station; every minute was a minute lost. Yet
he clung to the hope of seeing Mark again, and it was a great comfort
to know that Grace was with the poor fellow. Mark would not know that
Grace was there, for consciousness had left him while his injuries were
being attended to; but there had been a moment in which Valentine had
bent over his bed, and had been rewarded by a flash of recognition from
the dull eyes.
It had been Grace’s suggestion that Christina should be brought. It was
a duty to bring the wife to her dying husband, but Christina little
guessed how much this duty was costing Valentine. She had no desire to
reach London.
If the train could have gone round and round in a circle she would have
been content. Her imagination conjured the present into a dream of the
future, that future when, as Valentine’s wife, it would be her due to
receive all his care and anxious thought.
“I shall win him,” she told herself, confidently. Now that she had come
in direct contact with him again, she felt she had been right to have
faith in her powers, for she saw his weakness. Nevertheless, he was not
a man to be won as she had won Mark Wentworth.
It was not merely physical loveliness that would have sway with this
man; there must be a nature as well, just that gentle, half-timid
nature that the conventional man credits the conventional woman with
possessing. Valentine was, so Christina quickly determined, one of
those men who did not care for independence in a woman, but who would
lose his head and his heart to a delicate, clinging creature who dared
make no step alone.
“He to care for Polly!” she said to herself, scornfully. “Why, the idea
is absurd—that is, unless Polly is changed altogether. All her life
she has been a spitfire and an independent creature. She could not
possibly attract this man.”
London reached, Valentine piloted Lady Wentworth into a cab, and they
drove away through gaslit streets on and on till they reached the
country-like neighborhood where poor Mark Wentworth lay dying.
It was a long drive, and the cab jolted roughly from time to time, but
the air of the summer night was cool and fresh, and the sky spread its
star-spangled canopy in wide, dark beauty over the city.
When they reached their destination it was growing toward midnight.
Grace came down into the entrance of the clubhouse to receive them.
She spoke no word at first, but her two hands went out to Christina,
and Christina, remembering the part she had set herself, let her hands
rest in Grace’s strong ones.
She looked very white, and frightened, and sad in this moment, and
Grace’s heart softened as Valentine’s had done.
“Oh! I am so sorry for you—so sorry,” Grace said, and then the tension
of her nerves gave way, and she broke into tears. “Oh! poor Mark!” she
said, hoarsely, and she turned away.
Christina did not shed tears, but she was equal to the situation all
the same.
“I want to go to him, please,” she said to Valentine, lifting her eyes
to him piteously. “Will you take me?”
And Valentine bowed his head, and led the way up the stairs; but he had
not gone many steps before he had to turn and support her, and fragile
as Christina was in appearance, her weight grew heavier and heavier
till, as they came to the top of the stairs, Valentine felt she was
unable to move further, and looking down on her pale face pressed
against his arm, he saw that her eyes were closed, and he told himself
that she had fainted.
The further thought came to him that he had wronged this woman deeply,
when he had accused her of having no heart, and a bitter pang of
reproach mingled in with his pity for her, and with his grief, deep,
true grief for the poor young fellow lying dead in his prime only a few
yards away.