THE ICY BARRIER.
Ravenel Levallion, who had once been Ravenel Annesley, got up with
weak and shaky legs and stared at the brown shadow of a man who stood
between her and the sun. For man it was, and no spirit. When ghosts
arise from the dead they are not ushered to their dearest by an
obsequious butler, while two footmen with the tea things bring up the
rear. Dreadful, inappropriate laughter that meant more than any tears
shook the Countess of Levallion as she stood up in her white serge and
Mechlin lace.
“Captain Gordon!” the butler repeated a little reproachfully, for this
was not the way to receive his lordship’s cousin.
“I--I see him!” was all she could find to say; all the greeting she had
for the man to whose side she had meant to creep on the resurrection
day.
“Ravenel!” he whispered, and if her face were white, his was gray; all
the wild, incredulous joy that had shone there at the first sight of
her dead as ashes. “For God’s sake, how do you come here?”
But he knew. With a swift and dreadful certainty he remembered the
butler had said Lady Levallion was at home--though he had not known
there was one before--heard in the pause that came as she tried to
answer him the smooth voice of a servant saying, “Tea is served, my
lady.” Desperately the girl caught at her breath that would not come;
and her first word was for the footman, and not for him.
“Yes,” she said, “you can go,” and then, with a coward’s courage,
turned to Adrian Gordon.
“I live here. I’m his wife.” For her life she could not look at him
with the triumph a woman should have in her revenge on a man who has
deceived her. “But you--you died! We heard it this morning.”
We! Captain Gordon--and that man must have been a fool who first
christened the Gordon’s “gay”!--grew as black and sour and stern as
Levallion at his worst.
“You,” he said, “cannot have read the papers of late, since you only
knew this morning that I was missing. I never--except to you--was in
the very least dead, though, God knows, I wish I had been!”
“How did you get here?” She was still standing, holding herself up with
tense hands on her wicker chair.
“Sit down,” said the man, because she was a woman. But she never moved.
“Tell me,” she said thickly.
“It can’t interest you.” He felt suddenly listless, utterly
indifferent; looked not at her, but the grass. “I turned up one morning
at the fort. They invalided me home, and I got here yesterday. This
morning,” and he might have been saying a lesson for all the feeling
in his voice, “I reported myself at the War Office and found Levallion
had been there, thinking me dead, so I came down after him. I would not
have come if I had known----” He did not trouble to finish.
“He’s not here. You must have caught an earlier train,” incoherent from
anger that he should own he had been afraid to meet her. “But he’s
coming.”
“Naturally,” with ugly quiet.
He never looked up, and he could not feel her eyes on his face,
half-wild with the joy of seeing him and the horror of knowing--face
to face with him--what he was. Oh! if she could have gone back to the
May that was gone forever, how she would have cried out at the dreadful
change in his face. The hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes, the----
“Why is your arm in a sling?” she cried, with scorn of herself that she
could not be glad of his pain.
“Shot,” with an inward curse that might have made the man who did it
turn in his grave, since it was that shattered arm that had brought him
here.
“Sit down,” said Lady Levallion, and she said it so tonelessly that in
astonishment he obeyed her. “You are not fit to stand.”
“Why should you care?”
“I don’t,” she returned calmly, and for an instant did not think it was
a lie.
The callousness of his manner had hardened her heart; her forgiveness
that had been so real vanished. She felt old, old and weary, where she
sat in her Worth dress. If she had dared she would have cried out that
to be Nell Annesley again in her Sunday frock, thinking the man she
loved was true, she would give the soul out of her body. She gripped
herself hard, and spoke to him as to any one of those friends of
Levallion’s who were here to-day and gone to-morrow----since she could
not call him “contemptible” to his face.
“May I give you some tea?” Her voice stung like a whip. Almost he had
had it on his tongue to say, “Why did you do it--who taught you your
woman’s game?”
But as he glanced at her across Levallion’s old silver and Crown Derby
he had his answer. A secret marriage and a twopenny emerald ring were
well changed for all this.
“I must be going,” he said. But as he rose a twinge caught him, and he
sat back stiffly.
“You were foolish to come,” she said, with a coldness that hid a mad,
shameful longing to ease his bodily pain, for any other he could not
have, since he had done everything by his own free will.
“You had better have wine than tea,” striking a little silver gong!
Her bread and salt were choking; but before the footman who brought
the wine there was nothing to do but swallow it. Not six months ago
she would have looked at him as he raised the glass to his lips, cried
“My love to you,” as he drank it. To-day--without a glance at him--she
filled her own teacup with a steady hand.
The silence when the servant was gone was like something tangible; a
barrier that could be felt. Gordon had absolutely nothing to say, and
she was no better. While he gulped down the unwelcome wine, without
which he must have fainted, she was back again in that country lane,
counting her thousand steps; back in the drawing-room of Annesley
Chase, where “Levallion had been kind.” Her heart was like a stone in
her as she watched Gordon covertly. How drawn and hard his face was,
and he was only nine and twenty. He did not look so very far from
death even now, and the thought hurt her, for all her shame that she
could care.
“Did you get the second man?” she blurted out in the sudden knowledge
that she must say something, anything.
“No!” with a grim surprise that she should ask. “I may say that he got
me. It was he who took me back to camp.”
If she could have realized the pitiful return of those two scarecrow
skeletons who had been prisoners with the Afghans, known how they came
home in the darkness, crawling, worn out, despairing, when the blessed
challenge of their own sentry came on their ears, for sheer pity she
must have broken down; have asked him without shame, as one asks the
dead, why he had left her to break her heart; have said things that
might have been the beginning of an end bad enough, but better than
the one her girl’s feet must tread. But the scanty sentences drew no
picture for her. Instead she saw only that there was a line of gold
wire round his third finger that was half the size it had been, and
wondered if it were his wife’s ring.
“They will give you the V. C. for the first man,” she said hastily, and
wondered how many men would get the V. C. if it were given for truth
and not for valor.
“I don’t know. It was nothing. Every fellow would have done it. Who
told you, about the V. C., I mean?”
“Levallion” was on her lips, when she saw the gold wire of his ring
catch the sunlight. The shame of a woman who has loved a man who jilts
her caught her at her heart.
“My husband,” she said quietly.
And this time it was Adrian Gordon who quivered where he sat.
“I must go!” he said, cursing himself for a fool that he should be here
talking to the girl who had seemed to him the very flower of the earth,
and was only a woman who loved rank and money. “I must get back to
town.”
Back to his lonely rooms, where the tint of her cheek and the curve of
her eyelash, the bow of her young mouth, would rise before him line by
line and make him revile the fate that had let him find her out.
Back to loneliness, to pain that racked him, to the fever that would
make him drain his water-jug before the morning, but each and all of
them better than seeing, as he did now, how she would not meet his
eyes. But the last person who should know he cared was Levallion’s wife.
“You will tell Levallion”--after all, he was not as callous, or,
perhaps, as brave, as she; he could not say “your husband”--“that I had
no idea I should not find him here. Perhaps he will look me up in town.”
“Is that all?” she said stupidly, seeing only how very ill he looked as
he stood before her.
“All!” surprised. “Yes, I wanted to thank him; it was through him I got
to the front.”
“I thought.” She was faltering, and she hated herself.
“Do you know,” she said with sudden, vicious cruelty, “that you have
never congratulated me on my marriage?” and then could have died of
shame, for he was answering her as a man does who is born, not made, a
gentleman.
“Levallion is one of the best,” quietly. “Certainly I congratulate you.”
Yet the words were hardly out of his mouth before she was angry again
that he, who had deceived her, should say them.
“Here is Levallion,” she cried. “You had better congratulate him!”
He bit his lips that he had not gone before; turned sharply, and struck
his shattered arm against her chair. The grinding torture turned the
daylight black--he was going--going----
With a quick cry Lady Levallion leaped forward and caught him as he
fell in a dead faint.
Long afterward the scene came up before her husband’s eyes, just as
those two had looked against the sunset. And at the memory of her
quick, inarticulate cry he buried his worn, handsome face in his hands.
But now Lord Levallion only lifted the weight that was too heavy for
his wife’s strong young arms and laid his cousin on the grass.
“The returned hero is not out of the graveyard yet!” he remarked. “Let
him lie, Ravenel, and ring for the servants.”