PRESTON CHENEY walked briskly down the street after he left his fiancée,
his steps directed toward the Palace. It was seven o’clock, and he knew
the Baroness would be at home.
He had determined upon heroic treatment for his own mental disease (as he
regarded his peculiar sentiments toward Berene Dumont), and he had
decided upon a similar course of treatment for the Baroness.
He would confide his engagement to her at once, and thus put an end to
his embarrassing position in the Palace, as well as to establish his
betrothal as a fact—and to force himself to so regard it. It was strange
reasoning for a young man in the very first hour of his new rôle of
bridegroom elect, but this particular groom elect had deliberately placed
himself in a peculiar position, and his reasoning was not, of course,
that of an ardent and happy lover.
Already he was galled by his new fetters; already he was feeling a sense
of repulsion toward the woman he had asked to be his wife: and because of
these feelings he was more eager to nail himself hand and foot to the
cross he had builded.
He was obliged to wait some time before the Baroness came into the
reception-room; and when she came he observed that she had made an
elaborate toilet in his honour. Her sumptuous shoulders billowed over
the low-cut blue corsage like apple-dumplings over a china dish. Her
waist was drawn in to an hourglass taper, while her ample hips spread out
beneath like the heavy mason work which supports a slender column. Tiny
feet encased in pretty slippers peeping from beneath her silken skirts
looked oddly out of proportion with the rest of her generous personality,
and reminded Preston of the grotesque cuts in the humorous weeklies,
where well-known politicians were represented with large heads and small
extremities. Artistic by nature, and with an eye to form, he had never
admired the Baroness’s type of beauty, which was the theme of admiration
for nearly every other man in Beryngford. Her face, with its infantine
colouring, its large, innocent azure eyes, and its short retroussé
features, he conceded to be captivatingly pretty, however, and it seemed
unusually so this evening. Perhaps because he had so recently looked
upon the sharp, sallow face of his fiancée.
Preston frequently came to his room about this hour, after having dined
and before going to the office for his final duties; but he seldom saw
the Baroness on these occasions, unless through her own design.
“You were surprised to receive my message, no doubt, saying I wished to
see you,” he began. “But I have something I feel I ought to tell you, as
it may make some changes in my habits, and will of course eventually take
me away from these pleasant associations.” He paused for a second, and
the Baroness, who had seated herself on the divan at his side, leaned
forward and looked inquiringly in his face.
“You are going away?” she asked, with a tremor in her voice. “Is it not
very sudden?”
“No, I am not going away,” he replied, “not from Beryngford—but I shall
doubtless leave your house ere many months. I am engaged to be married
to Miss Mabel Lawrence. You are the first person to whom I have imparted
the news, but you have been so kind, and I feel that you ought to know it
in time to secure a desirable tenant for my room.”
Again there was a pause. The rosy face of the Baroness had grown quite
pale, and an unpleasant expression had settled about the corners of her
small mouth. She waved a feather fan to and fro languidly. Then she
gave a slight laugh and said:
“Well, I must confess that I am surprised. Miss Lawrence is the last
woman in the world whom I would have imagined you to select as a wife.
Yet I congratulate you on your good sense. You are very ambitious, and
you can rise to great distinction if you have the right influence to aid
you. Judge Lawrence, with his wealth and position, is of all men the one
who can advance your interests, and what more natural than that he should
advance the interests of his son-in-law? You are a very wise youth and I
again congratulate you. No romantic folly will ever ruin your life.”
There was irony and ridicule in her voice and face, and the young man
felt his cheek tingle with anger and humiliation. The Baroness had read
him like an open book—as everyone else doubtless would do. It was
bitterly galling to his pride, but there was nothing to do, save to keep
a bold front, and carry out his rôle with as much dignity as possible.
He rose, spoke a few formal words of thanks to the Baroness for her
kindness to him, and bowed himself from her presence, carrying with him
down the street the memory of her mocking eyes.
As he entered his private office, he was amazed to see Berene Dumont
sitting in his chair fast asleep, her head framed by her folded arms,
which rested on his desk. Against the dark maroon of her sleeve, her
classic face was outlined like a marble statuette. Her long lashes swept
her cheek, and in the attitude in which she sat, her graceful,
perfectly-proportioned figure displayed each beautiful curve to the best
advantage.
To a noble nature, the sight of even an enemy asleep, awakes softening
emotions, while the sight of a loved being in the unconsciousness of
slumber stirs the fountain of affection to its very depths.
As the young editor looked upon the girl before him, a passion of
yearning love took possession of him. A wild desire to seize her in his
arms and cover her pale face with kisses, made his heart throb to
suffocation and brought cold beads to his brow; and just as these
feelings gained an almost uncontrollable dominion over his reason, will
and judgment, the girl awoke and started to her feet in confusion.
“Oh, Mr Cheney, pray forgive me!” she cried, looking more beautiful than
ever with the flush which overspread her face. “I came in to ask about a
word in your editorial which I could not decipher. I waited for you, as
I felt sure you would be in shortly—and I was so _tired_ I sat down for
just a second to rest—and that is all I knew about it. You must forgive
me, sir!—I did not mean to intrude.”
Her confusion, her appealing eyes, her magnetic voice were all fuel to
the fire raging in the young man’s heart. Now that she was for ever lost
to him through his own deliberate action, she seemed tenfold more dear
and to be desired. Brain, soul, and body all seemed to crave her; he
took a step forward, and drew in a quick breath as if to speak; and then
a sudden sense of his own danger, and an overwhelming disgust for his
weakness swept over him, and the intense passion the girl had aroused in
his heart changed to unreasonable anger.
“Miss Dumont,” he said coldly, “I think we will have to dispense with
your services after to-night. Your duties are evidently too hard for
you. You can leave the office at any time you wish. Good-night.”
The girl shrank as if he had struck her, looked up at him with wide,
wondering eyes, waited for a moment as if expecting to be recalled, then,
as Mr Cheney wheeled his chair about and turned his back upon her, she
suddenly sped away without a word.
She left the office a few moments later; but it was not until after
eleven o’clock that she dragged herself up two flights of stairs toward
her room on the attic floor at the Palace. She had been walking the
streets like a mad creature all that intervening time, trying to still
the agonising pain in her heart. Preston Cheney had long been her ideal
of all that was noble, grand and good, she worshipped him as devout
pagans worshipped their sacred idols; and, without knowing it, she gave
him the absorbing passion which an intense woman gives to her lover.
It was only now that he had treated her with such rough brutality, and
discharged her from his employ for so slight a cause, that the knowledge
burst upon her tortured heart of all he was to her.
She paused at the foot of the third and last flight of stairs with a
strange dizziness in her head and a sinking sensation at her heart.
A little less than half-an-hour afterwards Preston Cheney unlocked the
street door and came in for the night. He had done double his usual
amount of work and had finished his duties earlier than usual. To avoid
thinking after he sent Berene away, he had turned to his desk and plunged
into his labour with feverish intensity. He wrote a particularly savage
editorial on the matter of over-immigration, and his leaders on political
questions of the day were all tinctured with a bitterness and sarcasm
quite new to his pen. At midnight that pen dropped from his nerveless
hand, and he made his way toward the Palace in a most unenviable state of
mind and body.
Yet he believed he had done the right thing both in engaging himself to
Miss Lawrence and in discharging Berene. Her constant presence about the
office was of all things the most undesirable in his new position.
“But I might have done it in a decent manner if I had not lost all
control of myself,” he said as he walked home. “It was brutal the way I
spoke to her; poor child, she looked as if I had beat her with a
bludgeon. Well, it is just as well perhaps that I gave her good reason
to despise me.”
Since Berene had gone into the young man’s office as an employé her good
taste and another reason had caused her to avoid him as much as possible
in the house. He seldom saw more than a passing glimpse of her in the
halls, and frequently whole days elapsed that he met her only in the
office. The young man never suspected that this fact was due in great
part to the suggestion of jealousy in the manner of the Baroness toward
the young girl ever after he had shown so much interest in her welfare.
Sensitive to the mental atmosphere about her, as a wind harp to the
lightest breeze, Berene felt this unexpressed sentiment in the breast of
her “benefactress” and strove to avoid anything which could aggravate it.
With a lagging step and a listless air, Preston made his way up the first
of two flights of stairs which intervened between the street door and his
room. The first floor was in darkness; but in the upper hall a dim light
was always left burning until his return. As he reached the landing, he
was startled to see a woman’s form lying at the foot of the attic stairs,
but a few feet from the door of his room. Stooping down, he uttered a
sudden exclamation of pained surprise, for it was upon the pallid,
unconscious face of Berene Dumont that his eyes fell. He lifted the
lithe figure in his sinewy arms, and with light, rapid steps bore her up
the stairs and in through the open door of her room.
“If she is dead, I am her murderer,” he thought. But at that moment she
opened her eyes and looked full into his, with a gaze which made his
impetuous, uncontrolled heart forget that any one or anything existed on
earth but this girl and his love for her.