ONLY A BIT OF GOLD FILIGREE.
Lord Stratharden sat in his own bedroom in the little maisonette that
opportune whitewashing of his had allowed him to return to as if he had
never fled from it, and pursued a peculiar employment with interest.
On the floor beside him, and even in his preoccupation he was careful
not to let cigarette ashes fall in them, were two open boxes, the
entire wardrobe of a woman who, if she had little, had it dainty.
Nothing was marked and everything was almost new.
Stratharden turned up the last layer in the last box with the patience
of a man who is thorough, even though he expects nothing.
At last he found something that flushed his sallow cheek.
“My God!” he said softly, because in his youth he had believed in one.
“This thing--and me!”
For he knew what he had in his hand as a man knows a trinket with which
he has tried--and failed--to buy a woman. Only a bit of gold filigree
with a turquoise N on it--a cheap offer for a woman’s soul and body if
it had only possessed the value it looked and not a thousand thousand
times more.
“So she kept it. She was a clever devil!” he thought, but the look of
the pin made a devil in him as he held it. His world would have been
loud in incredulous laughter if they had known what was in his mind.
Never in all his variegated life had Stratharden’s soul or mind, or
flesh even, turned with a real emotion to any woman but this one, who
had only cared for another man. He thought of the women who had given
him all she denied him; was sick again as he had been in their arms,
because there was no pleasure in any woman’s kisses but hers; cursed
aloud because for all his pains he had been “faithful to her in his
fashion” in many a gray dawn and midnight madness. Oh, he owed her a
debt--a debt! Never in all his life had any woman quickened his pulses
in him; never, try as he might, had he been able to care. It was a good
debt--and he would pay it. Pay it so that Ninon’s rotting flesh should
feel it in her grave.
“Her daughter!” exclaimed Lord Stratharden, and did not know his mouth
was gray. “And I did it for the chance. I never, as God’s my witness,
believed in it.”
But he believed now. He sat, an old man, racked with accusing thoughts.
And Ninon had died young, out of her torture--and what his reflections
were is not good to write.
A noise, that in another house would have been called brawling, brought
him out of his thoughts in a flash. Quick as he was he had but time to
get those open boxes into a safe place before the winning side in that
loud fight was on him.
Mrs. Keith, her hand tingling from the crack that had blinded James,
stood beside him. And the man who meant to put back the clock one way
or another lifted his eyebrows at her in cool inquiry.
“Is David dead--or Ardmore burned?” he asked.
“Ye’ve done it,” she said, and it was not an answer; nor did she
trouble to close the door. “Ye spied on me till ye found her out, and
now ye’ve spirited her away. Ye and yer heathen, and Buff Ogilvie, that
I thought his mother’s blood had leavened till yer own was out of him.”
Lord Stratharden shut the door and handed to her a glass of neat
whisky; and as he spoke the wonder on his face was real.
“Drink that and sit down. You’re exhausted. And then tell me what
you’re talking about.”
“Ye well know!” She was breathing heavily and she needed the whisky, if
it was her enemy’s. When she put down the glass her hand was steady.
“Oh, ye well know, Stratharden! Ye can cease yer play-acting and yer
eyebrow rounding. That girl that ye wanted--his daughter--brings me
here.”
He stopped her as a man stops a ball.
“Are you at that old story?” he asked slowly. “Poor Keith, it isn’t
true. There’s no hope of it. That girl lives only in your faithful
head. Do you think that I, hopelessly ousted myself, would not be
glad to believe in it and give Barnysdale’s wife and brat the go-by,
as you’d say? I would, indeed. But that red-haired, black-eyed Clyde
girl is nothing but what she seems--Lady Barnysdale’s half-sister. Do
you want me to see her? For I will with pleasure.” And he looked so
guileless and truthful that she feared him as she had never feared him
before.
“Bring her out then, if ye’d see her,” said she. “For a man who sent
Buff Ogilvie to her and then took her by ye’re heathen, ye’re not
overclever.” She had warmed to her work, perhaps aided by the whisky,
and she forgot caution. She raved at him and told all she knew, and
he sat like a stone till she was done. Then he touched her shoulders
forgivingly.
“You’re quite foolish,” he said gravely. “As for the girl, she is only
an impostor, and all you’ve told me is guesswork. What would I do with
her? And as for Ah Lee, he left my service a month ago. I know no more
of him than the dead. If she’s disappeared it’s----What did you mean
about Buff?” he asked with a sudden flash that seemed natural, though
it had required a supreme effort to defer the question. He could not
for his life see how Buff could be mixed up in it, and yet some words
came back to him queerly.
“I’ll tell him!” She fairly spat the words at him. “I believe no single
word ye’ve said. I----”
The room went round, turned dark; if some one fell Mrs. Keith did not
hear the crash of it.
“Very like a fit,” said Stratharden musingly, five minutes after.
“Queer stuff, whisky.”
He rang the bell and gave a kindly order. The old woman was such a
faithful servant and apparently so ill; and he really could not have
Buff told things by anyone but himself.
It was nothing to him that through that long night a girl was calling
for Buff by a name his father had never heard, but it was important
that Buff was the only person to be feared in the whole business.
“And that good Keith has forewarned me of him,” said Lord Stratharden,
and went peacefully to his bed.