My heart stood still. Thinking calmly, it seemed that Diana had no power
to harm Eagle March. I had the coat which betrayed Sidney. Eagle had the
written message, and his friend in America had the notebook out of which
it had been torn. The chain of our evidence was complete. It could not
be broken. Eagle had long ago seen through Diana and ceased to worship
her. Surely she could do nothing with him now, no matter how shamefully
she might humble herself. But I could not think calmly. And as I heard
her sweet, imploring voice, begging to come in, as I realized that Eagle
could not shut her out, a heavy presentiment of failure weighed upon me.
I braced myself to be ready for anything that might happen, ready to
spring from behind the screen and confront Diana if need came.
"If you ever cared for me, if you have any pity for an unhappy woman,
let me in--let me speak to you," were the words I heard her say, in a
voice like the wail of harp-strings. Its pathos would have been
irresistible to any man, even if he had never loved her. Eagle March let
Diana come in, though I heard him protesting that his friend Jim White
might arrive at any moment.
"What does it matter?" she cried; and with the words she was at the
study door. Through the leaves of the tall screen I saw her trail in, a
figure of beauty in her white satin dress and sombre purple cloak, her
dark hair wreathed with a fillet of emerald laurel leaves that gave her
face the look of some tragic muse of long ago. "I know Jim White," she
hurried on, "and he knows me well enough to be sure I'm here for nothing
wrong! I'm not afraid of him. It's you I'm afraid of, Eagle!"
She stopped, and faced him. Unknowingly she faced me, too. Eagle's back
was turned toward me, but I could see Diana's blue eyes gazing up at
him. They were sad and beautiful beyond words. With a shiver of fear, I
realized that no woman on earth could be lovelier than my sister. All
womanhood, with its appeal to man, was in her great imploring eyes.
I was glad that Eagle did not answer. I hoped his silence might mean
that her beauty had lost its magic for him, that he understood fully how
she had come to beguile him, and that he meant to give her no opening.
"This is the first time I have seen you since--since that night at
Alvarado when you bade me 'good-bye,'" she went on, letting her voice
break into a half-stifled sob.
"You saw me at the Embassy," he answered, so coldly that, in her place,
I should have been chilled with discouragement.
"I dared not look at you there," she confessed. "I was afraid
of--myself. Oh, Eagle! I'm even more afraid of you now--more afraid than
of myself!"
"Really, I am not so very formidable, Lady Diana," said Eagle, with cool
scorn that showed in tone and manner. "But if I may ask--since you stand
in such dread of me, why do you come to beard the lion in his den?"
"Because the lion is brave and kingly I have ventured. I _had_ to come,
Eagle. There was no other way. I found out your address from your
Russian friend, Major Skobeleff. He happened to mention it, asking me if
I knew Jim White who'd lent the place to you. I didn't guess then how
thankful I'd soon be to know where you lived. Oh, Eagle! Don't look at
me so cruelly! I can't bear it. You hate me, but you mustn't judge. If
you knew everything, you'd see that you'd done me a wrong."
"I should be sorry to think that," said Eagle, as formally as if he
spoke to a stranger. "And you are mistaken if you really suppose I hate
you. I have gone through a good deal lately, Lady Diana, and learned to
see personal things in the right proportion. Let me assure you, my
feelings toward you are not in the least malevolent."
"You mean you don't care for me any more? I ought to be glad, for your
sake and mine, too. But I _did_ love you, Eagle. I truly did, only--I
was a coward. I was deceived, as other people were deceived. And I had
Father to think of as well as myself."
"Don't excuse yourself to me, I beg! All that is past and done with. You
didn't come here I'm sure to----"
"Ah! If the past could be done with! It can't, and that is why I have
come. I know Peggy has been with you. It's useless to tell me she has
not."
"I've no intention of telling you a lie, Lady Diana."
Di broke down, and cried without any effort to restrain herself. She did
not look quite her beautiful self when she cried, but she looked a
hundred times more pathetic. "You won't believe me, I suppose," she
sobbed, "but till to-night I never knew--knew that Sidney had deceived
me. I believed what he told me to believe. It is an awful blow! I
think--my heart is broken. But, oh, God, Eagle, if you ruin him before
the world it will be my death!"
To my astonishment Eagle answered with a laugh--a laugh of exceeding
bitterness.
"You seem to believe and disbelieve easily, Lady Diana Vandyke!" he
said. "Once you believed in me. Then you ceased to believe in me and
threw me over because another man--a richer man than I--told you and
everybody else that I was a liar. You believed in him instead--on his
mere word. You married him. May I ask if he has confessed to you, or do
you take his guilt for granted as you took mine, on circumstantial
evidence?"
"No, he has not confessed anything," Di answered. Yet there was
something in her tone and confused, anxious manner that made me sure she
was not telling the truth. The conviction swept over me that something
had happened at the house in Park Lane since I slammed the front door
and ran out. Diana might have thought twice before coming to grovel here
to Eagle, unless she had been sure that I was not jumping to
conclusions--sure that there could be no possible mistake about _what I
had found in Sidney's coat_. Suddenly I knew as well as if she had put
the story into words that Sidney had come home before she had made up
her mind what to do; that she had told him about the coat, and that I
had carried it off to Eagle March; that Sidney, knowing well what my
discovery must have been, had broken down and sent Diana to Eagle, in
the one last hope that her pleading might save him from his enemy's
revenge.
"I haven't seen Sidney," she hurried on. "But--instinct tells me some
things. I'm afraid--I know that his loving me so much made him cruel to
you. Oh, don't look at me like that. You turn me to ice. It's
true--'cruel' isn't a hard enough word for what he did. I don't try to
excuse him. But he sinned for my sake. That softens my heart toward him.
I'm human!"
"I'm not inhuman, I trust," said Eagle, "but it doesn't soften _my_
heart toward him."
"I don't ask that," Diana wept. "All I ask is your forgiveness for
me--that you soften your heart for me!"
"I forgive you freely, Lady Diana," Eagle answered, "for any injury you
may have done me in the past, for I have lived it down. The injury
Vandyke did me, I thought--till to-night--I could never live down. But
thanks to the most loyal friend a man ever had I've been given my
chance."
Diana flung up her head, and there were no tears in her eyes. "Peggy a
loyal friend!" she cried. "She's a traitor to Father and me when she
betrays Sidney. What right has she to be loyal to you at our expense?
And it isn't loyalty, not what _you_ mean by loyalty. She has always
hated Sidney for your sake, and now she can calmly see him ruined, not
because of any wish for justice, but simply because she's desperately,
idiotically in love with you; because she'd do anything--no matter how
cruel to others--in the hope of winning you for herself. Now you know
the real truth about Peggy."
"I wish I could think it were the real truth," said Eagle very quietly
and very slowly. "To have Peggy's love would be the best thing in the
world. I've realized that for some time now--while I was under arrest
before my court-martial and had plenty of time to think. That was the
time it was borne in on me, Lady Diana, just how much difference there
is between you and Peggy."
Diana stood speechless, staring at him.
I was afraid the two out there might hear my heartbeats, they sounded so
loudly in my own ears.
"I realized how foolish I'd been, not to see that difference before,"
Eagle went on, still speaking with a deliberate distinctness, as if he
were willing I should catch every word.
That he should be saying such things to Diana was so wonderful, so
almost incredible, that I asked myself if he were saying them only to
save my pride because Di had snatched my love for him out of hiding and
trailed it in the dust at his feet. "I ought to have loved Peggy almost
as much as I love her now, the very day we met first. I ought to have
felt she was the _one_ woman--the one thing in the world for me. But she
looked such a child! It would have seemed like sacrilege to love her as
a man loves a woman--that little sprite of a creature. And then I met
you. You dazzled me, Lady Diana. That's the word for it. I think no
other would fit. But I didn't know I was _only_ dazzled, till you took
the light away. As soon as the bright spots faded from before my eyes,
as bright spots do at last when you've been staring at the sun, I saw
things as they really were. I saw what my feeling for you was worth, and
what my feeling for Peggy might grow to be. But I tried not to let it
grow. I'd suffered enough. I was down and out, and if I wasn't worthy of
you, still less was I worthy of Peggy. Besides, I thought she was
engaged to Dalziel, and I wanted to be glad for her. He's a good fellow.
Then we were thrown together in Belgium, she and I; and if I hadn't
loved her before, I should have begun to love her then, as a man loves
just one girl in his life. Whatever I have done since--the few small
things I have been able to do--have all been with the thought of her in
my heart as a lodestar. So now you will understand, Lady Diana, how
little impression you can make upon me by calling your sister a
traitor."
"You say all this to hurt me!" Diana cried out. "But you did care for me
once, Eagle. Do not forget that!"
"I forget nothing," he said. "But the time you speak of seems a long
time ago, I care so much more for Peggy now. Just how much I care for
her, I am going to prove to you in a moment."
For a second he paused, while Di waited, not knowing what to say; and it
seemed as if I were waiting, too; my heart and breath stopped for his
next words.
"If I had ever loved you as dearly as I once thought I did," he went on,
sadness in his voice, "I suppose I could have refused you nothing when
you came to me to-night. But--I don't defend myself--I only confess to
the hardness in me; you haven't moved me at all. You were cruel as the
grave to me. I could be cruel in return to you. That is, I could act as
I thought right and be indifferent to the effect on you. Your husband
did his best to ruin me. Virtually, he did ruin me. Even to-night he has
lied again, the same old lie, to pull me down if he could from the
miserable little height I've crawled up to, like a singed moth creeping
out of the flame. Did you ever believe in his truth and my
guilt--believe in the depths of your soul--if you have a soul? I doubt
it! Anyhow, you helped his lies to-night, as often before; of that I
have no doubt at all. I've no mercy for you in my heart, and none for
Vandyke. I had none, even when I stopped the horses on your wedding day.
I didn't do that from any softening of heart toward either of you. It
was purely mechanical. I'd have done the same for a pair of thieves, I
assure you. Nothing you could say to me for yourself, Lady Diana, would
make me give up my revenge, or rather my justification, which--by his
own fault--can't come to me without Vandyke's ruin. But something you
have said about Peggy has made all the difference."
"About Peggy? What do you mean?" Di faltered.
"You said that she was a 'traitor to her people' for my sake. Now,
because I love her, I can't let her be that. I won't profit by her
loyalty to me--at your expense. And I won't have the world say in
speaking of her, 'There's Lady Peggy O'Malley, who bore witness against
her brother-in-law and ruined him.' For myself, I believe it wouldn't
give me a qualm if Vandyke blew out his brains to-morrow, but you have
made me realize that I couldn't bear it for _her_ sake. Thank you for
that, Lady Diana. Here is the paper which Peggy found inside the lining
of your husband's coat, and brought to me. Because of Peggy and my love
for her, take it and do with it as you choose."
Diana gave a little joyous shriek, but my cry of despair mingled with
it. I pushed back the screen so that it tottered and fell with a crash,
as I flew out in time to seize Eagle's hand with the paper in it.
"No!" I gasped. "Don't let me have lived for nothing, Eagle! I would
gladly have given my life to get this bit of paper for you. I shall die
of grief if I'm not to help you after all."
Holding the written message firmly in one hand, he laid the other over
mine.
"You heard all I said?" he asked. "I am glad. I meant you to hear it in
your sister's presence. Yet, though you heard, you speak of not
_helping_ me, Peggy? What she said isn't true, then? It isn't true that
you love me?"
"It is true, and you know it only too well," I answered, hardly
remembering that Diana listened, hanging anxiously on every word as on a
verdict for life or death. "I worship you, Eagle; and that's why I don't
care to live if you are not saved. The great chance has come, when we
least expected it, and if you don't take it now it's in your hand----"
"It seems to me that my way of taking the great chance is after all the
only way, if we are to be happy. Peggy, I find that I love you too much
to take any other way. Can you love me as I am, love me enough to say:
'Do what is right for you?'"
"It is right for you to have justice!" I pleaded with him.
"I would rather have love."
"You can have both!"
"No. It doesn't seem so to me."
"Oh, you are obstinate--obstinate!"
"Perhaps! I'm afraid I always was. But I love you. I've suffered, and
now I want to be happy and at peace. It isn't only for your sake. It's
for mine as well. Great love is worthy of the only great revenge. Shall
I burn the paper?"
"For God's sake, say yes, Peggy!" I heard Diana sob. But I hardly
listened. If she said more, I did not hear it. I was looking at Eagle.
"Does silence give consent?" he asked. There was a new light in his
eyes, brighter and clearer than the careless light of youth that was
lost. I could not quench it. So I bowed my head and let the khaki coat,
which half unconsciously I had been holding all the time, drop to the
floor. The glory of Eagle's smile repaid me. He took my hand in his, and
leading me, walked to the fireplace. There he stooped, and without
hesitation dropped the paper, which might have changed his whole life,
into the flames.
"Good-bye to the past!" he cried. "Hail to the future! Peggy, such as it
is, such as it can be for me now, will you share it?"
"You know!" I whispered.
He pressed my hand tightly, then turned to Diana.
"You had better go home to your husband," he said. "You can sleep in
peace to-night, and all nights. Presently I shall take Peggy to
Hampstead; but I want her to myself for a moment first."
Without a word to either of us, Diana obeyed, her head bent low. I
suppose she could find nothing to say, since "Thank you" would be
commonplace: and Di is never commonplace.
I heard Eagle open the door for her, and shut it behind the trailing
white satin and purple brocade. Then he came back to me and held out his
arms.
I had been in the sky with him before, but this was heaven.
* * * * *
He is at the front now, and has been for a long time, but whatever may
happen, neither life nor death can part our souls. The sacrifice he made
was for my sake, and for the sake of love. So you see why, changing only
our names, I have written this bit of secret history and told the truth
about Eagle March and Monsieur Mars.
THE END