Produced by Al Haines
[Illustration: Cover art]
[Frontispiece: "She was aware instantly that the strangers were
speaking of her"]
THE LADY EVELYN
_A Story of To-day_
By
MAX PEMBERTON
_Author of "The Hundred Days," "Doctor Xavier," "A Gentleman's
Gentleman," "A Puritan's Wife," Etc._
New York
CUPPLES & LEON COMPANY
Publishers
_Copyright 1906 by Max Pemberton_
_Entered at Stationers' Hall_
_All rights reserved_
CONTENTS
BOOK I.--THE ESCAPADE.
CHAPTER
Prologue. The Face in the River
I. A Telegram to Bukharest
II. Etta Romney is Presented
III. Success and Afterwards
IV. Two Personalities
V. The Letter
VI. Strangers in the House
VII. The Nonagenarian
VIII. Lady Evelyn Returns
IX. The Third Earl of Melbourne
X. The Accident Upon the Road
XI. A Race for Life
XII. The Unspoken Accusation
XIII. The Interview
XIV. Inheritance
XV. The Price of Salvation
XVI. A Game of Golf
BOOK II.--THE ENGLISHMAN.
XVII. Gavin Ord Begins His Work
XVIII. A Duel over the Teacups
XIX. From the Belfry Tower
XX. Lovers
XXI. Zallony's Son
XXII. A Spy from Bukharest
BOOK III.--THE LIGHT.
XXIII. Bukharest
XXIV. The Price Of Wisdom
XXV. The House Above the Torrent
XXVI. Through a Woman's Heart
XXVII. Etta Romney's Return
XXVIII. The Impresario's Prayer
XXIX. The Prisoners at Setchevo
XXX. There is no News of Gavin Ord
XXXI. The House at Hampstead
XXXII. A Shot in the Hills
XXXIII. Djala
XXXIV. The Shadow of the River
Epilogue. The Doctor Drinks a Toast
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"She was aware instantly that the strangers were
speaking of her" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - _Frontispiece_
"Oh, please let me go; your hands hurt me"
"As you came in folly, so shall you go----"
"Evelyn, beloved, I am here as you wish"
[Illustration: (Facsimile Page of Manuscript from THE LADY EVELYN)]
THE LADY EVELYN
PROLOGUE
THE FACE IN THE RIVER
The porter did not know; the station-master was not sure; but both were
agreed that it was a "good step to the 'all"--by which they signified
the Derbyshire mansion of the third Earl of Melbourne.
"Might be you'd get a cab, might be you wouldn't," said the porter
somewhat loftily--for here was a passenger who had spoken of walking
over: "that'll depend on Jacob Price and the beer he's drunk this
night. Some nights he can drive a man and some nights he can't. I'm
not here to speak for him more than any other."
The station-master, who had been giving the whole weight of his
intelligence to a brown paper parcel with no address upon it, here
chimed in to ask a question in that patronizing manner peculiar to
station-masters.
"Did his lordship expect you, sir?" he asked with some emphasis; as
though, had it been the case, he certainly should have been informed of
it. The reply found him all civility.
"I should have been here by the train arriving at half-past six," said
Gavin Ord, the passenger in question--"it is my fault, certainly. No
doubt, they sent to meet me----"
"The brown shay and a pair of 'osses stood in the yard more'n an hour,"
exclaimed the porter with just reproach. "I'll tell Mr. Jacob. He
knows his betters when he sees him, drunk or sober----"
"Thank you," said Gavin quietly, "but I will not put his knowledge to
the proof. After all, it's only five miles, you say----"
"And a public-house at Moretown if the dust sticks in your throat.
You'll do better walking than up alongside old Jacob at this time of
night, sir----"
"Had we known that his lordship expected a guest, we'd have answered
for a carriage," added the station-master, still apologetically.
The tall, fair-haired Englishman perplexed him. He hardly knew whether
he addressed a Duke or a commoner. The voice and manner suggested the
former; the intention to walk spoke of a vulgar habit rather befitting
his lordship's curate than the honored guest of Melbourne Hall. Gavin
Ord, upon his part, perhaps, delighted in perplexing people. He quite
understood the kind of curiosity he had aroused; and, refusing to
gratify it, he snatched up a light dressing bag; and leaving directions
for his heavier luggage to be forwarded in the morning, he set off
briskly upon the high road to Moretown, beyond which, as all the world
knows, lies the Manor of Melbourne.
"Going to make a long stay, sir?" had been the amiable station-master's
last shot.
"Oh, I may settle down there for a long time," said Ord in reply; and
this news was all over the village in an hour.
Strangers upon the road to Melbourne Hall were not so many that one
should escape remark.
"If he's for the Lady Evelyn," the blithe porter confessed over his
cups at a later hour, "she might go farther and get a worse-looking
man. Gave me a shillin', he did, and carried his bag hisself. That's
what I call a gentleman, now."
Unconscious of this tribute to his qualities, Gavin Ord was then more
than three miles upon his road to Melbourne Hall. A hot day of August
had given place to a delicious night, fresh and cool and redolent of
sweet perfumes. The moon stood high above the horizon, shining with
glorious mellow light upon the gathered sheaves and the grattan where
the wheat was garnered. So plain were the hill-tops to be seen that
the very flocks could almost be numbered upon them; while the bare
walls of limestone, the tors of spar, and the higher mounts were veined
as by rifts of jewels, giving back in glittering flashes the moonbeams
they had husbanded. The roads themselves were eloquent by night. When
a farmer's cart went rumbling by, Gavin could hear the echo of the
horse's hoofs and the rolling sound of wheels for quite a long time.
He was a man of redoubtable physique, trained by laborious days at home
and abroad to the finer qualities of his endurance; and nothing was
more to his liking than this lonely pilgrimage to a splendid house
wherein he believed that an advantageous welcome awaited him. A
stranger to Lord Melbourne, he never allowed himself to forget that his
own talents and achievements had made this visit possible and opened to
him the doors of a house which few even of the aristocracy now entered.
For Gavin Ord was callen in London the first among the younger school
of architects--an artist of prodigious originality and daring, and one
with as many sides to his talent as a diamond has facets. Already had
Burlington House heaped her honors upon him. The great Church at
Kensington would, he believed, stand as his memorial to all time. But
for a prodigality and a refusal to consider a mere matter of money, his
plans for a new cathedral in the North would certainly have been
accepted by the committee. As it was, critics said, "There is the man
of to-morrow." He liked to hear them say it, for he had a great
conceit in his art if none for himself. Something of the spirit of the
old-time builders moved within him. His imagination dwelt in lofty
temples, roamed in vast aisles--looked down upon men from a masterpiece
of spires. He was but a servant, if only the stone which dominated
men's hearts.
And now this famous old recluse, this eccentric unknown Earl of
Melbourne, had summoned him to save the stately Melbourne Hall from its
only enemy--time. He could not have found a more congenial task upon
all the continents.
There can be no journey more pleasant than that which carries us a
stage upon the road to our ambitions. Every event of the wayside is
then an adventure to us; every inn at which we rest seems to offer us
ambrosia. Here was Gavin Ord, at ten o'clock of the night, as good a
walker upon the road to Melbourne Hall as any trained athlete out with
the lark for a morning breather. Five or ten miles to go, it mattered
nothing to him. He had forgotten already the five hours in a stuffy
train; his mind was set upon the beauties of the moonlit landscape, the
fine wooded slopes of the hills, the twinkling lights in the hollows,
the dark towers of the scattered churches--more than all, upon the
distant goal and the reception which would await him there.
How earnestly had the old Earl implored him to go to the Manor!
"Here is the finest Tudor house in England," he had written; "you can
save it. Make it your home and learn to love it as I do. They tell me
that in your leisure you ride and shoot. I will introduce you to the
finest fencer in Derbyshire, and you shall tell me what you think of
the pheasants. Don't expect to find a house-party. I see few people.
I desire to see fewer. My daughter will play tennis with you, and, if
you are a golfer, there are lean long women on the hills who talk of
nothing else but hazards and whins. These preach sermons in stones.
Come and hear them, and my motor shall show you Derbyshire. But, above
all, become the servant of the Manor, as every true artist must be."
The letter of a man, Gavin said to himself when he read it. He liked
it best because there was no gilt-edge of money upon it. The Earl's
prodigious wealth had been the one blot hitherto upon the fair panorama
of his desires. "There will be a host of flunkies in red breeches," he
had thought, "and every one of them will look the question, 'How much
is he good for?'" He knew that the present Master of Melbourne Hall
had come to the estate and the title almost by accident late in life,
and after an adventurous career which men spoke of openly in clubs, but
rarely in private life. A wild man who had been everything from a
discredited attache at Bukharest to an equally unsuccessful miner in
Australia--this was the third Earl of Melbourne.
* * * * *
And what of his daughter, the Lady Evelyn?
There were but wild fables spoken about this unknown girl and the
secluded life her father compelled her to live at the Manor House.
Some said she was the daughter of a Roumanian gypsy whom the Earl had
married after his disgrace at Bukharest. Others declared that her dead
mother had been an actress who had enjoyed a brief spell of notoriety
in Vienna and thence had been driven out by the infatuation of an
archduke. None knew the truth, but there were many to suggest what the
truth might be. Openly and scandalously, as the world will, idle
tongues hinted that the Earl must have some good reason for his
eccentric conduct. There were even stories that the Lady Evelyn was
unmistakably a gypsy girl herself. "As brown as a walnut chiffonier,"
said little Backbiter at the Club. The fellow had never been within
fifty miles of Melbourne Hall; and if he had met the Earl, he would
have gone down on his marrow bones to him.
Gavin Ord recalled some of these stories as he followed the tortuous
road and left the solitary village still farther behind him. They did
not interest him. He had gone into Derbyshire to see not a woman but a
house. Delight that he should be chosen for guardian of such a
national treasure as Melbourne Hall went with him upon his way. He
must be now, he thought, but a mile from the Manor gates. The road had
become narrow and closely bordered by leafy elms. No longer could he
see the moonlit heights or the twinkling lights in the valleys. There
were no kindly beams to guide his steps. In weird darkness he followed
the dusty track and pressed on toward the Manor. The rustling of
leaves sounded almost like a human voice in his ears. He liked to
think that Nature was still awake and speaking to him.
So it is evident that he possessed that quasi-divine attribute,
imagination. His mood of thought responded instantly to any change,
atmospheric, or of the light of the heavens. The sunshine could ever
build temples of success for him; the twilight rarely failed to bring
the question, what is the good of it all, of ambition and the stress
and strife of arenas. In the night he would awake to remember that all
men must die. In the daytime he would laugh at death and all the vain
problems of the hereafter. That Melbourne Hall, approached in this
gloom of a summer's night, should provoke no evil thoughts but only
those of good omen, seemed a new witness to the pleasure with which he
contemplated his stay there. He would accomplish something amid those
ancient stones by which men should remember him. The aspiration
quickened his step. A turn of the road revealed the lodge-gates, with
a lighted window and a pleasant cottage. He entered Lord Melbourne's
park and discerned the Hall, dim and stately and starred with lights,
across the little river which stood for a moat before its walls.
This, then, was his goal, this superb fabric which the genius of the
mediaeval age had bequeathed to England and to posterity. No words
could rightly have described the emotions which stirred his imagination
as he stood to contemplate the jagged line of building and battlement,
chapel, tower and stable, which his hand should snatch from the greedy
hand of time. The very park, with its soft grasses, and deer in shadow
pictures beneath the trees, could conjure up a vision of knights and
pages and stately dames and all the witching pageantry of
half-forgotten centuries. The great house itself might have been the
house of a thousand mysteries, locked in banded coffers, enshrined in
ghostly walls--crying aloud none the less to him who would listen to
the tongue of their romance. Gavin Ord stood in an ecstasy of homage
to worship at the gates of such a temple as this. And, standing so, he
heard a woman's cry.
He had walked across the park with slow steps and come to the narrow
bridge of five Roman arches which spanned the shallow river--shallow,
save for one deep pool over which many a fisherman must have thrown a
skilful fly. Standing by the balustrade to contemplate the picture,
his delighted eyes traced every tower and pinnacle of Melbourne Hall
with an artist's ecstasy--thence looked out over the moonlit park to
glades of surpassing beauty and scenes which the centuries had
hallowed. How inimitable it all was--the mighty yews about which
Elizabeth's courtiers had grouped; the groves which had listened to
many a child of Pampinea--the fearsome walls, what tragedies, what
comedies, had been played within them! Even a dullard might
contemplate the scene with awe. Gavin Ord was no dullard, and the
spell it cast upon him was such as he had never known in all his life.
So entirely did it claim his mind and will that when he heard a woman's
low cry beneath the very bridge he stood upon, he scarcely turned his
head or gave the matter a thought.
What had happened; whence came the sound? Being repeated, he could no
longer ignore it. In truth, it awed him not a little; for it was not
the voice of a woman in danger but of one asking his pity, his help, as
it seemed, in a low whispering voice which he now heard more clearly
than if a strong man had shouted at him. Taking one quick glance at
the river, Gavin declared that the cry could not have come from there.
Splashing and leaping over mossy boulders, a child might have waded
across the stream, he thought. Then whence did the cry come? Turning
about, to the right, to the left, he discovered himself to be still
alone. It was the voice of imagination he began to say; and was about
to quit the place when he heard it for the third time, and so
unmistakably, that he no longer doubted it to be human.
Some one called to him from the river below the bridge.
He climbed upon the old stone parapet and looked down straight to the
black silent pool about the arches. So dark was it in the shadows that
the keenest eyes might not have perceived a human thing there. Gavin
Ord, however, saw the thing as clearly as in daylight--a woman's fair
head with great sodden leaves about it and streaming black hair caught
up upon the ripples. A shudder of awe indescribable came upon him as
he looked. For the woman was dead, he said--had been long dead, and
yet her voice spoke to him.
He knew that she was dead, for the water lapped upon her half-closed
eyes and the fair head turned slowly as the eddies swirled slowly about
it. Every right instinct told him that this was a vision and not a
truth of the night. He listened for the voice again; but it was silent
now. As it ceased to speak to him, the spell vanished. He ran round
quickly to the river bank and clambered over the slippery stones to the
pool's edge.
It was black as night and void as the ether.
* * * * *
Gavin Ord was not a nervous man and very far from a superstitious one.
When he had quite assured himself that he had been dreaming, his first
act was to return to the path and laugh aloud at the whole venture.
"Melbourne Hall is generous to me," he said; "here are the very ghosts
coming out to welcome me."
None the less he tried to remember what he had eaten in the train for
dinner and whether his recent nights had been late or early.
"I shall get to bed at ten here," he said to himself, "and put in a
good walk before breakfast. I have been doing a good deal and I never
was great at night work. Of course, if I told anyone, I should be
written down a liar. It's always the case when you hear or see
anything the other man has not seen or heard."
He caught up his bag and marched on resolutely up the wide gravelled
drive by which you reach the great gate of the Manor. A loud bell
answering to his touch awakened splendid echoes in the courtyard of the
house and set the dogs barking within. When a footman opened to him,
he discovered that Melbourne Hall was a building about a quadrangle and
that its main door admitted him no farther than to the great square
court of which the chapel and the banqueting hall were the chief
ornaments. Above the latter, lights shone brightly in many windows.
But the courtyard itself lay in darkness.
"Say that Mr. Ord is here," Gavin instructed the footman, and added: "I
am very late, I fear; I was stupid enough to miss the afternoon train."
The footman, shutting the door with a solemn formality, called another
to his aid that the dressing case might be safely conveyed to the
guest's bedroom.
"'Is lordship was sayin' you wouldn't come, sir. Longish walk by
Moretown too. We'd have sent the motor but the 'shuffer' don't like
late hours. 'Is lordship is now in the boodore along of the Lady
Evelyn. This is Mr. Griggs, the butler, sir----"
Gavin was not particularly interested in the fact; but the butler in
question had no intention of being ignored. A fat and pompous man of
flat and florid visage, he stood, in majestic pose, at the head of the
short flight of stone stairs leading to the boudoir, and his attitude
no archbishop could have bettered.
"Mr. Gavin Ord, is it not?" he asked.
Gavin said that it was so.
"We kept dinner back ten minutes, sir--I trust there has not been an
accident."
"No accident at all--go and tell the Earl that I am here."
Mr. Griggs looked as though he had been shot.
"James will do that," he retorted loftily--waving his hand as a
conductor waves a baton.
The obsequious footman strolled off to do the majestic man's bidding
and Gavin meanwhile found himself in the banqueting hall, an old Tudor
apartment he had admired in many pictures but now entered for the first
time. The banners of three centuries hung in tatters from its oaken
ceiling; the musicians' gallery stood as it was when fiddle and harp
made music there for the seventh Henry, but Gavin resented the fashion
of electric lamps none the less and instantly resolved to change
them--in which intention the fat butler interrupted him with the news
that the Earl awaited Mr. Ord in the long gallery.
"Her ladyship is there too, sir. Perhaps you will be taking supper
afterwards."
"Nothing to-night," replied Ord quickly; "I shall dream enough in the
old house without that."
"And I dare say you will, sir. Many's the night I've seen a something,
though I couldn't rightly say what it were."
Gavin judged that it might have been a flask of spirits which thus
troubled the good man's dreams; but he made no comment as they mounted
a broad staircase, and passing through a dainty little room in one of
the turrets of the house, entered the superb long gallery which is the
very masterpiece of Melbourne Hall. The vast length of this, its
glorious ceiling, the carvings in geometric tracery, the embrasured
windows, the bays, the ingles--how familiar they seemed to Gavin, and
yet how far from the truth of them had the drawings been! Just as a
man may enter joyously the house of his dream as a very home of love
and welcome, so did Gavin pass into the gallery and feast his eyes upon
its treasures. Here, he said, a life's work might be done, indeed;
here the ripest genius might fall and be gathered by the lap of time.
There were brass candelabra at intervals upon the walls of the gallery
and little electric lamps aglow in the sham candles above them. Far
down the immense apartment, Gavin perceived the stalwart figure of a
bronze-faced man and by his side a young girl, whose pose was so
natural, whose manner was so clearly that of an aristocratic, that he
did not hesitate to name her instantly for Lord Melbourne's daughter.
Unable at the distance to see much of her face, it took shape for him
as he drew nearer; and so he found himself against his will staring at
her intently as one who would satisfy himself as to where and when he
had seen her before. This interest he could not immediately explain;
nor did her father's cordial if somewhat loud-toned greeting recall him
from his vain pursuit of identity. He felt instinctively that the Lady
Evelyn was no stranger to him, and yet for the life of him he could
give no good account of any previous meeting.
"Welcome to Melbourne Hall, Mr. Ord--I had begun to say that you had
deserted us."
Gavin stammered some vain tale of lost train and business calls; but he
did not tear his eyes away from the Lady Evelyn's face.
"Great God," he said to himself at last, "that was the face I saw in
the river!"
BOOK I
THE ESCAPADE
CHAPTER I
A TELEGRAM TO BUKHAREST
Upon a night of May, some twelve months before Gavin Ord had gone down
into Derbyshire at the Earl of Melbourne's invitation, Count Odin, a
Roumanian celebrity of evil reputation in his own country and none in
others, quitted the Savoy Hotel by the Strand entrance and had just
called a hansom when a well-dressed girl, whom he was surprised to see
afoot, stumbled by accident against him, and nervously, yet very
prettily, offered him her apologies.
Gifted with a prodigious amount of quite unmeaning gallantry, the Count
bowed low and said in passable English that no harm had been done and
that it should be his part to apologize.
"Mademoiselle," he said, "it is all the fault of your narrow pavements.
Here is a cab. Since we are no longer strangers permit me to drive you
to your destination. The night is too hot for you to walk."
The girl drew back instantly as though covered with confusion, and
without vouchsafing a single word of reply to the civil invitation,
went on westward as fast as the busy street would permit her to walk.
Her only desire appeared to be to escape recognition by those who
passed her by. She might have been any age between twenty and
twenty-five years; her hair was coal black, and her eyes were of the
deepest blue. So much the Count had not failed to observe; but his
curiosity was not by any means at an end. Dismissing the cab with a
haste so pronounced that a fortune might have hung upon his quest, he
set off down the Strand after the unknown; and was soon so near to her
that his outstretched hand could have touched her as she walked.
Who was she? Whither was she going; whence she had come. The meeting
had been so unlooked for, it appeared to be such a very story of
marvels that the man would not, dare not even now, believe in his good
fortune. For three years, often by day and night, he had been dreaming
of an hour when he would find the daughter of the man who had consigned
a father to a living grave and compelled the son to a vagrant life.
And here, in a London street, he met her face to face--not by his own
desire or cleverness, but by one of those accidents which are the true
tragedies of life. Never for a single moment did he doubt that she was
the woman he sought. He had come to England, guarding as a precious
possession a miniature painting which had been found among his father's
effects. The face which he had so often looked upon in that little
picture was most certainly the face he had seen for one brief instant
in the Strand this night. Eyes, expression, the shape of the
characteristic mouth, the tiny ears, the coal-black hair, how familiar
they seemed to him. "She is Forrester's daughter," he said, and walked
the faster for the thought.
It was an easy task, for the girl had no idea that anyone followed her.
Crossing the street by St. Martin's Church, she passed the National
Gallery at the same swift walk; and neither looking to the right nor to
the left, she made straight for Pall Mall and the Carlton Hotel there.
At the first hazard, Count Odin believed that this was her destination,
a fact which puzzled him not a little; but she passed the hotel without
a glance at its doors and going on up the Haymarket, turned suddenly
into one of the little courts there and was instantly lost to his view.
In his turn, he recognized the place at a glance, and as though both
relieved and enlightened stood a moment upon the pavement to debate the
situation.
"So," he said to himself, "my lady is an actress--or would it be a
chorus girl? Well, we shall soon find that out."
He strolled up the narrow alley, and coming to a broad double door of
wood, saw written above it in big red letters, "STAGE DOOR," and, on a
bell below, the words "Carlton Theatre." The comparative quiet of the
scene, the few people about, and the darkness of the passage beyond the
door told him that a rehearsal was in progress and not an actual
performance. When he read the bill of the play, affixed to a dirty
board, he learned that on the following Wednesday evening, at
eight-thirty precisely, Mr. Charles Izard would present Etta Romney in
the new play "Haddon Hall," by Constant Hayter. Not much of a
play-goer, though a recognized frequenter of those houses devoted to
musical comedy, the Count asked himself if he had ever heard the name
of Etta Romney before. He could not remember to have done so--but,
while he stood there, the stage door-keeper came out to smoke a pipe in
the alley, and to him the Count addressed himself with that disregard
of diplomatic approach which is a habit of the dubious adventurer.
"The young lady who just went in--I think she is a friend of mine."
"Ah," said the stage door-keeper, without taking his pipe from his lips.
"If you could tell me her name, I would send in my card."
"No doubt you would," said the stage door-keeper.
Nonplussed, the Count stroked his mustache a little viciously and began
to fumble in his trousers' pocket.
"No good," said the stage door-keeper, anticipating the offer, and then
bridling up as he recognized the kind of man he had to do with, he
exclaimed peremptorily:
"Come, it's time you went home to dinner, ain't it; you look hungry
enough."
"I was going to give you five shillings," said the Count.
"You keep 'em for your poor old mother in the workhouse," said the
stage door-keeper, and he went within and slammed the doors--a hint
that even Count Odin could not mistake.
Far from being disturbed at this honest rebuff, the Count, with an
adventurer's ready resource, strolled round to the front of the theatre
and consulted the play-bills there on the off-chance that one of them
would enlighten him. The box-office was closed at this hour, but
framed photographs of the company engaged for the new play, "Haddon
Hall," decorated the pillars of the vestibule; while a large picture,
full-length and conspicuously displayed, "presented" the heroine, Miss
Etta Romney, to such of the curious as should care to take their stand
before it. Hardly had the Count glanced at the photograph when he
recognized the original of it to be the young girl whom he had just
left at the stage-door.
"Forrester's daughter, beyond a doubt," said he.
He waited for no more but called a cab and drove to the telegraph
office in Waterloo Place. Thence he sent a long telegram to Bukharest.
It was vague in its terms and would have been understood by none but
the person who read it.
"Tracked down," it said; "am remaining here."