During those few hours of strenuous, almost fierce work into which
David threw himself after the funeral, he found in a collection of
belated cablegrams which his secretary handed him an explanation of
Letitia's half apology, an explanation, he told himself bitterly, of
her altered demeanour towards him. The old proverb stood justified.
Even this, the wildest of his speculations, had become miraculously
successful. Pluto Oil shares, unsalable at a dollar a few weeks ago,
now stood at eight. Oil had been discovered in extraordinary and
unprecedented quantities. Oil was spurting another great fortune for
him out of the sandy earth. He paused to make a calculation. The
Marquis's forty thousand pounds' worth were worth, at a rough estimate,
three hundred thousand.
"Extraordinary news, this, Jackson," he remarked to the quiet,
sad-faced young man, who had been his right hand since the time of his
first railway deal.
"Most extraordinary," was the quiet reply. "I congratulate you, Mr.
Thain. You do seem to have the knack of turning everything you touch
into gold."
"Do I?" Thain murmured listlessly.
"I took the liberty of investing in a small parcel of shares myself,
just to lock away," the young man continued. "I gave seventy cents for
them."
"Not enough to make you a millionaire, I hope?" Thain asked, with some
bitterness.
"Enough, with my savings, to give me a very comfortable feeling of
independence, sir," Jackson replied. "I have never aspired any further
than that."
Thain returned to his desk. He gave letter after letter, and more than
once his secretary, who had received no previous intimation of his
master's intended departure, glanced at him in mild surprise.
"I presume, as you are returning to the States, sir," he suggested,
"that we must try to cancel the contracts which we have already
concluded for the restoration of this place?"
Thain shook his head.
"Let them go on," he said. "It makes very little difference. I have a
seven years' lease. I may come back again. The letters which I gave
you with a cross you had better take into your own study and type. I
shall be here to sign them when you have finished."
The young man bowed and departed. David listened to the closing of the
door and turned his head a little wearily towards the night. The
French windows stood open. Through the still fir trees, whose perfume
reached him every now and then in little wafts, he could see one or two
of the earlier lights shining from the great house. Once more his
thoughts travelled back to the ever-present subject. Could he have
done differently? Was there any way in which he could have spared
himself the ignominy, the terrible humiliation of those few minutes?
There was something wrong about it all, something almost suicidal--his
blind obedience to the old man's prejudiced hatred, his own frenzied
tearing to pieces of what might at least have remained a wonderful
dream. One half of his efforts, too, had fallen pitifully flat. The
Marquis had only to keep the shares to which he was justly entitled, to
free for the first time for generations his far-spreading estates, to
take his place once more as the greatest nobleman and landowner in the
county. If only it had been the other scheme which had miscarried!
His avenue of elms was sheltering now an orchestra of singing birds.
With the slightly moving breeze which had sprung up since sunset, the
perfume of his roses became alluringly manifest. Through the trees he
heard the chiming of the great stable clock from Mandeleys, and the
sound seemed somehow to torture him. His head drooped for a moment
upon his arms.
The room seemed suddenly to become darker. He raised his head and
remained staring, like a man who looks upon some impossible vision.
Lady Letitia, bare-headed, a little paler than usual, a little, it
seemed to him, more human, was standing there, looking in upon him. He
managed to rise to his feet, but he had no words.
"I am not a ghost," she said. "Please come out into the garden. I
want to talk to you."
He followed her without a word. It was significant that his first
impulse had been to shrink away from her as one dreading to receive a
hurt. She seemed to notice it and smiled.
"Let us try and be reasonable for a short time," she continued. "We
seem to have been living in some perfectly absurd nightmare for the
last few hours. I have come to you to try and regain my poise. Yes,
we will sit down--here, please."
They sat in the same chairs which they had occupied on her previous
visit. David had been through many crises in his life, but this one
left him with no command of coherent speech--left him curiously,
idiotically tongue-tied.
"I have thought over this ridiculous affair," she went on. "I must
talk about it to some one, and there is only you left."
"Your guests," he faltered.
"Gone!" she told him a little melodramatically. "Didn't you know that
we had been alone ever since the morning afterwards? First of all, my
almost fiance, Charlie Grantham, drove off at dawn. He left behind him
a little note. He had every confidence in me, but--he went. Then my
aunt. She was the most peevish person I ever knew. She seemed to
imagine that I had in some way interfered with her plans for your
subjugation, and although she knew quite well that no woman of the
Mandeleys family could ever stoop to any unworthy or undignified
action, she decided to hurry her departure. She left at midday."
"But Miss Sylvia?"
"Sylvia was most ingenuous," Letitia continued, her voice regaining a
little of its natural quality. "Sylvia came to me quite timidly and
asked me to walk with her in the garden. She wondered--was it really
settled between me and Lord Charles? If it was, she was quite willing
to go into a nunnery or something equivalent,--Chiswick, I believe it
was, with a maiden aunt. But if not, she believed--he had whispered a
few things to her--he was hoping to see her that week in town. It was
most extraordinary---she couldn't understand it--but it seemed that
their old flirtations--you knew, of course, that they had met often
before--had left a void in his heart which only she could fill. He had
discovered his mistake in time. She threw herself upon my mercy. She
left by the three-thirty."
"My God!" he groaned. "And this was all my doing!"
"All your doing," she assented equably. "They were all of them
perfectly content to accept your story. There is not one of them who
disputes it for a single moment. But you were there, with the secret
door closed behind you, and, as my aunt said, there is really no
accounting for what people will do, nowadays. And now," she concluded,
"I gather that you are leaving, too."
"I am motoring up to town to-morrow morning," he said. "I haven't
ventured to speak of atonement, but your coming here like this, Lady
Letitia, is the kindest thing you have ever done--you could ever do. I
have tried, in my way," he went on, after a moment's pause, "to live
what I suppose one calls a self-respecting life. I have never before
been in a position when I have been ashamed of anything I have done.
And now, since those few minutes, I have lived in a burning furnace of
it. I daren't let my mind dwell upon it. Those few minutes were the
most horrible, psychological tragedy which any man could face. If your
coming really means," he went on, and his voice shook, and his eyes
glowed as he leaned towards her, "that I may carry away with me the
feeling that you have forgiven me, I can't tell you the difference it
will make."
"But why go?" she asked him softly.
His heart began to beat with sudden, feverish throbs. His eyes
searched her face hungrily. She seemed in earnest. Her lips had lost
even their usual, faintly contemptuous curl. If anything, she was
smiling at him.
"Why go?" he repeated. "Can't you understand that the one desire I
have, the one burning desire, is to put myself as far away as possible
from the sight and memory of what happened that night? We have been
telephoning through to London. I have taken my passage for America on
Saturday. I shall go straight out to the Rockies. I just want to get
where I can forget your look and the words with which your father
turned me out of his house. And worse than that," he added, with a
little shake in his tone, "their justice--their cruel, abominable
justice."
Then what was surely a miracle happened. She leaned forward and took
his hand. Her eyes were soft with sympathy.
"You poor thing!" she exclaimed. "You couldn't do anything else. I
have been thinking it over very seriously. It was a horrible position
for you, but you really couldn't do anything else, that I can see. You
told your story simply and like a man. But wait. There is one thing I
can't understand. Those shares--were they not to be part of that poor
man's vengeance. You surely never intended that we should benefit by
them in this extraordinary way?"
"I believed them," he told her firmly, "when I sold them to your
father, to be, until long after he would have had to pay for them, at
any rate, absolutely worthless. The wholly unexpected has happened, as
it does often in oil. Your father's shares are worth a fortune. He
can realise his idea of clearing Mandeleys. He can dispose of them
to-day for three hundred thousand pounds. Lady Letitia, you have come
to me like an angel. This is the sweetest thing any woman ever did.
Be still kinder. Please make your father keep the shares. They are
his. They were sold to ruin him. It is just the chance of something
that happened many thousand miles away, which has turned them in his
favour. He accepts nothing from me. It is fate only which brings him
this windfall."
"I promise," she said. "To tell you the truth, I think father is as
much changed, during the last few days, as I am. When I saw him, about
an hour ago, and told him that I was coming to see you, I was almost
frightened at first. He looks older, and I fancy that something which
has happened lately--something quite outside--has been a great blow to
him."
"Does he know, then, how kind you are being to me?" David asked.
She nodded.
"He rather hoped," she whispered, leaning a little closer still to him
and smiling into his face, "that you would come back with me and dine."
David suddenly clutched her hands. He was a man again. He threw away
his doubts. He accepted Paradise.
On their way across the park, a short time later, he suddenly pointed
down towards the little cottage.
"You haven't forgotten, Letitia," he said, "that I lived there? You
haven't forgotten that that old man was my uncle!--that his father and
grandfather were the servants of your family?"
"My dear David," she replied, "I have forgotten nothing, only I think
that I have learned a little. I am still full of family tradition,
proud of my share of it, if you will, but somehow or other I don't
think that it is more than a part, and a very small part, of our daily
life. So let there be an end of that, please. You have done great
things and I am proud of you, and I have done nothing except suffer
myself to be born into a very ancient and occasionally disreputable
family.... Oh, I must tell you!" she went on, with a little laugh.
"What do you think father was settling down to do when I came out?"
David shook his head.
"I have no idea."
"I left him seated at his desk," she told him. "He is writing a line
to Mr. Wadham, Junior, asking him to-day's price of the Pluto Oil
shares."
THE END
NOVELS by E. PHILLIPS OPPENHEIM
He is past master of the art of telling a story. He has humor, a keen
sense of the dramatic, and a knack of turning out a happy ending just
when the complications of the plot threaten worse disasters.--_New York
Times_.
Mr. Oppenheim has few equals among modern novelists. He is prolific,
he is untiring in the invention of mysterious plots, he is a clever
weaver of the plausible with the sensational, and he has the necessary
gift of facile narrative.--_Boston Transcript_.
A Prince of Sinners
Mysterious Mr. Sabin
The Master Mummer
A Maker of History
The Malefactor
A Millionaire of Yesterday
The Man and His Kingdom
The Betrayal
The Yellow Crayon
The Traitors
Enoch Strone
A Sleeping Memory
A Lost Leader
The Great Secret
The Avenger
The Long Arm of Mannister
The Governors
Jeanne of the Marshes
The Illustrious Prince
The Lost Ambassador
The Mystery of Mr. Bernard Brown
A Daughter of the Marionis
Berenice
The Moving Finger
Havoc
The Lighted Way
The Tempting of Tavernake
The Mischief-Maker
The World's Great Snare
The Survivor
Those Other Days
A People's Man
The Vanished Messenger
Mr. Grex of Monte Carlo
The Double Traitor
The Way of These Women
Mr. Marx's Secret
An Amiable Charlatan
The Kingdom of the Blind
The Hillman
The Cinema Murder
Bernard The Pawns Count
The Zeppelin's Passenger
The Curious Quest
The Wicked Marquis
LITTLE, BROWN & CO., Publishers, BOSTON
End of Project Gutenberg's The Wicked Marquis, by E. Phillips Oppenheim