ALEXIA’S VISITOR
On that same evening in London it was announced to Countess Alexia
that a Mr. Maxton was in the morning-room waiting to see her on urgent
business. Her brother was not at home, being away at a diplomatic
function. Alexia had dined alone and was now busy answering a batch of
letters of congratulation which the news of her approaching marriage
had brought. She sent down a request to know on what business so
late a visitor wished to see her, and word was brought back that it
concerned Mr. Herriard and was most urgent. Not satisfied with that
reply and beginning to be vaguely suspicious, Alexia sent to say that
she was busy and would be glad if Mr. Maxton would give her in writing
a more definite idea of what he wished to say. In a few minutes the
suggested note was handed to her. She opened it with some apprehension.
It consisted of but two lines. “Mr. Herriard has met with a serious
accident at Bradbury.”
Fighting against the faintness that came over her as she realized
instantly that the news might be but half told, she said she would
see the visitor, and, after a few moments of sickening fear, nerving
herself bravely to hear the worst, she went down to the room where the
messenger of evil waited.
As she entered, the man was standing with his back to the door,
scrutinizing a picture. It was not till Alexia had come some way into
the room that he turned, and with a thrill more of disgust than fear
she recognized him.
“Mr. Gastineau!”
He smiled and took a step towards her, holding out his hand. “Paul
Gastineau, Countess, risen from the dead.”
She ignored his outstretched hand, affecting to look at his note
which she held. “You have come to tell me of Mr. Herriard?” she said,
hoping now that the message might have been but a trick to induce her
to see him. “He has met with an accident?” she asked, with a touch of
incredulity.
Gastineau gave a little sympathetic shrug. “Poor Geoffrey! Yes, I’m
afraid he has had a bad experience. I have had a telegram--you know
we have of late been great chums, if not more--a telegram to say the
meeting was broken up and Herriard hurt. I thought I could do no less
than come round to tell you.”
Looking at him steadily, she told herself that he was lying. “You need
not have brought the message yourself; you might have sent it,” she
observed coldly.
He was evidently stung by her tone, for he returned, with a touch of
feeling, “In view of the relations which I understand exist between
you and Herriard I should scarcely have cared to give you what may
prove to be very serious news in an off-hand fashion. I regret that my
well-meant errand has met with so ungracious a reception.”
“I am sorry to hear that Mr. Herriard has been hurt,” Alexia said
stiffly. “Is that all?”
“Is it not enough?”
“Quite. I mean, I will not detain you longer.”
“One would think, Countess,” he said quietly, watching her with probing
eyes, “that you were glad, rather than sorry, to hear the bad news.”
“You can hardly expect me to discuss with you my feelings on the
subject,” she returned, with a significant move towards the bell.
He made a swift step forward and intercepted her. “Alexia--Countess,”
he said, with a note of passion in his voice, “is this my welcome back
to life?”
“What other,” she asked, coldly as ever, and with a self-possession
that hid her knowledge of how critical the interview must be, “could
you expect from me?”
“I had hoped,” he answered simply, “for one of a very different kind.”
Then his manner changed abruptly with a bitter exclamation. “Welcome!
As though I had not atoned by years of hopeless agony for all the sins
of my past! Alexia!” He tried to take her hand: she drew it away with a
movement of avoidance.
“No,” she said peremptorily; “I forbid you to speak to me like that.”
He bowed his head in submission and so hid the baulked devil that shot
a blaze into his eyes. “I come back to life and the world to find you
as beautiful, as cold, as cruel as ever,” he murmured, with schooled
humility.
“I cannot listen to you any longer,” Alexia said. “Please go.”
He was facing her now with a look of fight in his eyes. “My message to
you,” he protested with quiet insistence, “was two-fold. I warn you,
for your own sake and Geoffrey Herriard’s, not to dismiss me till you
have heard the second part.”
She gave a slight sigh of impatience. “If I must listen to you----” And
yet she felt that in her mind there was no alternative.
“More depends upon it than you imagine,” he replied coolly. “You shall
not be kept long; I, too, am busy.”
He placed a chair for her, and, with an annoying consciousness of
submission, she sat down. A sense of her old fear and dislike of the
man was creeping over her, and, giving her greater uneasiness still,
the subduing sense of his dominant will. It was fortunate, she thought,
that she had to act only on the defensive. Still, it might afford a
chance of divining the enemy’s tactics.
“I had,” he began, as he stood before her in the manifest consciousness
of power in will and brain, “to come in here under a false name; not
merely because I doubted your receiving me, but because Paul Gastineau
is to the world still dead, at least for some time longer. So much for
myself; I do not want you, of all women, to think of me as a trickster.
Now, to the point of my errand. You are going--you must make allowances
for my bluntness, time presses and I am a fighting man rather than a
diplomatist,--you are going to marry Geoffrey Herriard, very soon; but
sooner or later is immaterial. I have come,--forgive me,--to tell you
that you must not marry him.”
“Why not?” The question was put quietly. Alexia was surprised at her
own self-possession.
Gastineau’s eyes seemed to burn upon her now. “Because,” he answered
steadily, “he has stolen, or, at least, appropriated you from me.”
“No, no,” she protested, meeting his gaze defiantly. “That is absurd.
You have no right to say that.”
“Then,” he rejoined, with his cunning smile, “because I love you.”
“Oh!” Alexia rose with an exclamation of annoyance. “Mr. Gastineau, is
that persecution to begin again?”
His face was set with the suggestion of purpose. “There will be
no persecution on my part,” he replied darkly. “I trust we are
respectively too sensible to practise or to court it. All I am here
for now is to enlighten you, the woman I love with all my soul and
strength, as to the true position in which you stand, in a word, to
prevent your taking the shadow for the substance.”
“I think I understand you,” she returned, with a disdainful coldness
which made him rage inwardly, “and can save you the trouble of
inflicting upon me a repetition of a story which I have already heard.”
“Ah!” He seemed nettled at his forestalling. “So the famous Geoffrey
Herriard has been clever enough to see the desirability of making a
clean breast of his position before he was found out, and has confessed
that his cleverness has been borrowed--like his career--from another
man’s brains, eh? He has told you?”
“Everything.”
Gastineau’s face relaxed into a sneering smile. “I am sorry to hear
that, since it means that he has broken his word of honour, a solemn
promise made to me to whom he owes everything.”
“I should think,” Alexia said quietly, “his course was justified.”
He glanced at her sharply, and saw through her words that she knew
all. “No doubt,” he rejoined, “he would try to justify it, but we need
scarcely stay to argue that point. What I ask you to realize is the
fact that you are rejecting the real man in favour of his empty mask.”
“I do not accept your estimate of Mr. Herriard,” she replied curtly.
He seemed charged with the magnetism of a supreme, coercive will, yet
her coldness always held him at bay. He could scarcely hope to argue
successfully against that baffling attitude of dislike.
“I wish,” he continued, schooling his face and manner to an insinuating
humility, “that you would try to find it in your heart to entertain
a more favourable estimate of me. Alexia,” he went on passionately,
tactfully taking no more than a step forward as he saw her shrink
from his advance, “let me call you once by that name, if it is the
last time; Alexia, why can you not love me? What, in Heaven’s name,
is the curse upon me that gives hate in return where I have beggared
myself for love? Alexia,” he urged, with a passion that now was genuine
enough, “tell me, as one human soul speaking to another, what there is
in me that repels you, you of all women, the last in the world whom
I could have imagined rejecting substance for shadow. Tell me, even
though it be to my utter despair, tell me the truth, why do you so hate
me?”
He was bending forward, his face working, his eyes avidly pleading, his
body quivering betwixt infinite desire and intense restraint. Before
him Alexia stood like one at bay before a crouching tiger, desperate
yet unflinching. Perhaps had she not added the indication of courage to
beauty it might have lessened the deadliness of the attack. As it was,
she could meet his eyes and answer steadily:
“I never hated you till you began to persecute me----”
“Persecute!” he interrupted her impatiently, almost with temper.
“Cannot a man declare his love and do all in his power to get it
returned without being called a persecutor?”
“It is at least unchivalrous,” she replied, “to try to compel a woman’s
love. In the old days I could have had none for you. Now it is more
than ever impossible.”
His face lowered. “Since Herriard appeared on the scene,” he said
through his teeth. “Herriard, who is my creature, the puppet of my
whim, the marionette that, lying on my sick couch, I made to dance to
my fancy, and have ended, to my sorrow, by galvanizing into my rival.”
He spoke with an intensity of bitterness that seemed to strip naked his
jealous, malignant soul. But Alexia appeared to take little heed of the
stinging words. “Mr. Herriard,” she said coolly, “has little or nothing
to do with my feeling towards you.”
“No? Then we brush the lay figure aside out of our consideration.” He
accompanied the words with a contemptuous sweep of the arm. “At least,”
he continued, “I am glad you realize that a mere speaking puppet has no
right to stand between intellects like yours and mine. Now, tell me,
what have I done to stand worse with you now than in the old days?”
“You have slandered me, Mr. Gastineau,” she answered steadily.
He made a gesture of making light of a charge not worth denying. “To
the doll, to the child, to keep him from meddling with what was meant
for his betters, as we keep a baby’s hands off a valuable ornament
by saying it will bite him. Surely my presence here, the words I have
spoken to you, give the lie to the idea that I could ever believe ill
of you.”
“To my mind,” she retorted, “your slander, of all men’s, gives the lie
to what you have forced me to listen to to-night.”
A curious change swept over his face. He had realized, even before she
did, the half-thought that was suggested by and lay behind her words.
“You are quite right,” he returned, with a strange calming of the
passion that had seemed to rage within him. “Your reproach had more
justice in it than you, possibly, imagine. I should have been the last
man to accuse you even by innuendo. But I was desperate, a cripple,
helpless and, at that time, hopeless. My love made me mad with
jealousy, and it is the curse of jealousy that it can be cruel even to
the thing it loves. To think that a feather of my own disabled wing had
plumed the shaft that had struck my heart--yes, Alexia, I must have
been mad, or I could never have breathed a suggestion against the woman
whom I love beyond the power of all words to tell.”
“And whose offence, whose provocation in your eyes are that she can
never return the feeling,” she said with quiet firmness.
He bowed his head, strangely submissive. “I do not despair,” he
replied, in a low voice. “I cannot. Despair would mean death, and life
is strong within me; only less strong than my love. That I have laid at
your feet, only to be accepted with hate and distrust. I will prove my
sincerity. I will put the other, my life, into your keeping. Then you
will have all I have, since, with my love, my very soul and spirit are
yours. Alexia, I give my life into your hands.”
He paused; and the silence lasted till she was forced to ask, with a
suggestion of incredulity, “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he answered deliberately, “that I am going to prove the
sincerity of my love for you by entrusting you with a secret on which
my life may depend. You must believe in me, when I confide to you alone
of all the world that Captain Martindale met his death at my hand.”