There is a cynical French proverb which states that the worse the man,
the better he understands women.
In the case of the two Armstrongs the saying was so far true that
Wallace Armstrong the elder, after only half-an-hour's intercourse,
gauged to a nicety the mental and moral attributes of Clare Cavan, of
which his cousin had but an elementary notion. He admired her beauty,
and looked with amusement on her untruthfulness, her slyness, and her
envious disposition. Vanity and sensuality were two qualities he always
expected to find in women, and he at once recognised them as leading
characteristics of Clare's nature. She belonged to a type he thoroughly
understood; and he knew perfectly well that in her secret heart she
would not in the least resent the insolently-worded admiration or the
careless caresses of a man as handsome as himself, even though she
believed herself to be in love with his cousin. Like many another man
who professes to understand women, however, Wallace Armstrong had
gained his experience among the least worthy members of a sex which he
in consequence thought himself justified in scorning. Love of money
and love of themselves were, in his opinion, the two ruling motives
in every woman's life; and by appealing strongly enough to either of
these, any man could make a conquest of any woman--a conquest which,
when made, would be, in Wallace's opinion, not worth having. These
ideas, which he freely professed, only made him the more popular with
such women as came in his way, and he was able from experience to
calculate exactly the effect of his unconventional behaviour upon Clare
Cavan.
That young lady was not accustomed to being found out. Her drawing-room
triumphs had not prepared her for this rough-and-ready style of
address; but she relished it none the less, belonging as she did to the
type of woman who secretly worships a bully. Her intense vanity led
her to believe that the elder Armstrong had fallen in love with her at
first sight; and she would have been deeply mortified had she known
that his sole reason for ingratiating himself with her, and presently
with Mrs. Vandeleur, was that he might have opportunities of meeting
the girl who had been introduced to him as Lina Grahame. Clare Cavan's
kiss he instantly forgot; but Lina Grahame's look of scorn and hatred
seemed to burn into his soul.
How dared she--a penniless companion, a prudish, calculating,
fortune-hunter, intent on securing a wealthy husband--how dared she
gaze at him as though he were a thing accursed? Not for a moment
could he forget her dark eyes, distended with horror, as they fixed
themselves upon him, or the disdainful curve of her sweet red month,
or the tone in which she said she loved Lorin for being an honourable
gentleman, but pitied him since she had met his cousin.
For years he had not wished for anything so ardently as he now longed
to humble this girl's pride and give her back scorn for scorn. Her
face lingered persistently in his mind; he had but to close his eyes
to recall every feature with absolute distinctness, even the two
perpendicular lines between her eyebrows when she frowned, and the
quick trick of her fingers pushing her hair from her brow, seeming
strangely familiar to him. It was presumably the sympathy of hate, he
told himself, which made her image so clear and dominant in his mind.
Yet he lingered at Mrs. Vandeleur's, in the hope that Lina Grahame
might again appear, for fully an hour after the elder lady's return.
His handsome appearance and surly manners interested Mrs. Vandeleur,
who promptly prophesied all manner of evil things for him from a
cursory study of his hand and face.
"You have quite a remarkably wicked hand!" she exclaimed, bending over
it with a touch of genuine excitement. "Decidedly you were born under
an evil star, for you bring misfortunes to yourself and to other people
alike; and what is more curious, you appear to deserve them. I am
really afraid of telling you more, lest I should hurt your feelings."
"Not a bit. I am accustomed to strong language on the subject of my
character, from my relations and from police-court officials alike."
"You have no moral principles whatever," continued the little lady,
turning over his large, well-shaped, but, truth to tell, not over-clean
hand with her delicate be-ringed fingers. "You are wholly unreliable
and most ungrateful; your passions are violent, and you make no attempt
to control them. You are selfish to the core----"
"Pray stop the catalogue of my deficiencies, Mrs. Vandeleur, or your
niece here will fall madly in love with me!"
"Your past has been troubled and stormy, and your future looks very
black," continued the little lady, quite unmoved by his sarcasm. "Only
one thing can save you--the love of a good, pure woman."
She uttered the words with her usual slow impressiveness, letting his
hand fall as she finished speaking; and, although he affected to treat
the matter lightly, her words rang through Wallace's brain when he left
her house a little later in the evening.
It was a miserably dull and gloomy evening, bitterly cold and
shrouded in fog. There was some excuse for spirit-drinking under the
circumstances; but Wallace did not require an excuse for the constant
whiskies-and-sodas and "nips" of raw brandy in which he indulged at all
hours of the day and night when free from his cousin's watchful care.
Since his imprisonment he had been lodging in a street off the Strand;
and, although he was forbidden to enter Alexander Wallace's house, his
cousin encouraged his visits there in the hope of keeping him out of
mischief. It was easy enough for him to summon Adams by knocking in a
peculiar manner agreed upon between them, and then to slip up-stairs
to Lorin's rooms, where he was sure of warmth and comfort and a hearty
welcome. Old Alexander was aware that his orders regarding his elder
nephew were set at naught, and he was well pleased that it should be
so. Wallace had angered and shamed him so deeply that his name was a
forbidden subject in the household, and the old gentleman affected to
believe that he had only one nephew. That his sister's child, whom he
had brought up from a boy and loved as his own son, should be convicted
of drunkenness and brutal violence and sent to prison with hard labour,
had been a terrible blow to the old man, from whom Lorin had often
contrived to keep his cousin's delinquencies a secret. The disgrace of
the whole affair went nigh to break Alexander's heart, and none the
less so because he had always most unreasonably loved his elder nephew
the better of the two.
Lorin was now seven-and-twenty; and since his parents' death, eighteen
years before, he had been adopted by his uncle, to whom he had been
in every way a credit. Beyond a few school scrapes, the result of
boyish high spirits, and a little unnecessary expenditure at college,
there had been no fault to find with him. He had been a good, even a
brilliant scholar, and had won the liking and esteem of all who had to
do with him as a growing lad; and when arrived at man's estate the same
tale was true. Although disinclined for office work, he had set himself
to master the entire business at the bank, with the result that his
opinion was already of value in the house, while outside among general
society he was extremely popular and everywhere in great request.
With his cousin it was far otherwise. As a mere baby he had been
placed in Alexander Wallace's care by the latter's elder sister, a
woman of passionate and ungovernable temper, very unhappily married
to a man from whom she was speedily separated. The heart of the old
bachelor-uncle went out to the handsome black-haired baby boy at
first sight, and no subsequent delinquencies on Wallace's part could
wholly alienate from him his uncle's love. By turns he was expelled
from school, "plucked" for examinations, rusticated from college,
and gradually shunned by the more respectable and law-abiding of his
acquaintances. A fierce, sardonic temper and instinctive rebellion
against all constituted authority characterised him from early boyhood,
and his uncle's indulgence, while it bred in him no reciprocal
affection, developed to the full the boy's intensely selfish nature
and extravagant disposition. As a lad he possessed considerable charm
of manner, despite his intractable disposition; and from the time
when, at the respective ages of nine and twelve, the two cousins first
met, Lorin had loved and shielded him, often taking upon himself the
blame for Wallace's misdemeanours, and showing towards his elder an
affectionate forbearance which the latter was wholly incapable of
appreciating.
At twenty-one, Wallace Armstrong forged his uncle's name on several
separate occasions, chiefly in order to settle his heavy gambling
debts, some of which he had contracted at the club kept at one time by
Captain Garth, Laline's father.
Then followed years of banishment, spent for the most part in
gambling-dens, hotel-bars, and billiard-rooms, among the male and
female "riff-raff" of the Colonies, leading up to the moment of
Wallace's return to Europe, and his memorable meeting with Captain
Garth in the market-place of Boulogne.
From the time of his return to his uncle's house, under his cousin
Lorin's care, in deep mourning for the youthful bride of whom typhoid
fever had, so he said, deprived him, Wallace Armstrong's conduct had
grown daily worse. At the beginning he did indeed make some pretence
of earning his living as a clerk in his uncle's employment; but his
unpunctuality, his carelessness, and his habit of appropriating as
his own any loose change that might pass through his hands, speedily
proved his unsuitability for such a position. Both Lorin and his uncle
set to work to find some outdoor occupation which such a ne'er-do-well
might find within his powers; but Wallace's total unreliability, his
insolence and laziness, together with his intemperate habits, rendered
him undesirable in any wage-earning capacity whatever. He did not like
work and had no intention of working, and he detested regular hours and
the conventions of peaceable citizenship. But for Lorin's incessant
care and kindness and the generosity with which he denied himself in
order to provide his cousin with more than the mere necessities of
life, Wallace would have gone under long before. Yet he was in no way
grateful to Lorin, but cherished against him a bitter snarling envy
which he did not scruple to express in words.
"I know you enjoy unselfishness and that sort of thing," he would
say, while pocketing his cousin's money, "so I won't deprive you of
the chance of feeling virtuous. This doling out pocket-money to me,
and filling up my whiskies with your infernal soda-water, and bailing
me out when I am run in, all places you in a beautiful light of
self-sacrifice and stained-glass-window sort of nobility and charity.
The prodigal son's brother made a great mistake in openly grudging the
outlay on the other fellow; it would have paid him better in the long
run to have pretended a great concern for his welfare, as you do for
mine."
On this particular evening, when Wallace found himself in the Crescent
outside Mrs. Vandeleur's house, he did not feel in the mood for his
favourite amusement of sneering at his cousin. Certain things he had
seen and heard during the course of his visit had made an unusually
strong impression upon his ordinarily callous and drink-sodden brain.
"I love your cousin because he is a frank and loyal and honourable
gentleman--honest in his dealings with men, and gentle and chivalrous
to all women."
He could hear the words now ringing through his head in those sweet
deep tones of a voice which was oddly familiar to him.
Had this Lina Graham known him intimately instead of being a complete
stranger to him, she could scarcely have chosen words more calculated
to wound him by emphasising the differences between him and his cousin.
Frank and loyal, honourable and honest, gentle and chivalrous!
Not one of those qualities was to be found in Wallace, and he knew it.
Even his apparent brusque truthfulness was assumed, and he could, if
the occasion served, lie with apparent directness and simplicity. Women
in general, or, at least, such women as he met, liked a man the better
for his bad reputation; but this little prude in white was clearly not
of these. He hated to recall the scorn of her gaze; it pricked and
stung him even while he endeavoured to drown all clear remembrance in
copious draughts of fiery fluid. To-night, as he wandered from one to
another of his usual haunts, the miserable futility of the life he led
came before him for the first time. In the clear eyes of a girl he saw
himself mirrored and shrank in horror and disgust at the reflection.
In his thirty-first year, what was he but a homeless waif, a gaol-bird
and a drunkard, subsisting upon charity, and biting the hand that
fed him? Wallace buried his head in his hands and groaned aloud at
the thought. Among the common and degraded persons by whom he was
surrounded not one dared to ask what ailed him, for his surly and
insolent temper was well known. Looking up and around him, he felt
that he hated his companions, and that the coarse joviality which
he had hitherto commended as unconventional was mere forced drunken
buffoonery. Lina Grahame would know her contempt to be justified could
she see him among such surroundings. With a muttered oath, and leaving
his glass unemptied, he strode out again into the night. The fog got
into his throat and choked him, the streets were deserted, but for a
passing policeman on his beat and a few pedestrians loudly complaining
of the bitter frost and hurrying home.
Home! Wallace had no home. His landlady had already more than once
given him notice to quit; there would certainly be neither fire nor
welcome awaiting him there. As to his uncle's house, he could indeed
slip in there on the sly; but he had given his word to his cousin not
to present himself there when he had been drinking too freely, and of a
certainty he had been drinking too freely to-night.
What right had Lorin to extract such a promise--Lorin, to whom drink
offered no temptation? What right had such a man to make rules of
conduct for others? Doubtless he was sitting comfortably by the fire
in his well-furnished rooms, thinking of Lina Grahame, and writing
letters to her, or reading hers to him, or perhaps sketching her
portrait. Warmth and comfort, the glow of the fire, and sweet thoughts
of his love for him; the cold and dirty streets, the fog and frost,
the flaring lights of a gin palace, and the thought of a woman's
scorn, for his cousin. Very soon Lorin would marry, and then his,
Wallace's, surreptitious visits to his uncle's house would be forbidden
altogether. He could hear the voice in which she would speak the order
concerning them.
"Lorin dear, you must really keep your cousin away. His very appearance
is a disgrace to you. He is not fit to enter a gentleman's house."
In some such words she would speak, in that voice which to Wallace was
like an echo from the past. And to-morrow she would tell Lorin about
his disreputable cousin's visit, while she twined her arms about his
neck and clung to him as she had clung to Wallace that evening when she
had mistaken his identity.
He could feel the clasp of her fingers upon his shoulders now, and
the silky softness of her hair as he stroked it, and the quiver that
ran through her frame as he clasped her supple waist. She loved
Lorin--there was little doubt of that. Passionate love thrilled through
her touch, thrilled in her voice when she murmured--
"You have come at last!"
No good woman had ever loved him--no good woman had ever clung to him
and welcomed his coming with such whole-hearted delight. What had that
little witch woman prophesied about him?
"Your past has been stormy. Your future looks black. Only one thing can
save you--the love of a pure, good woman."
The fact that he was really married seldom if ever troubled him. If
it came into his mind at all, the remembrance provoked only curses
on the head of his missing wife. Had she only proved reasonable, he
might now have been installed with her in that very house at Hampstead
which would soon be prepared for the reception of Lorin and his bride.
Wallace cursed them both as he thought of them and of the happiness
that awaited them. Fate had been against him, luck had been against
him. His evil instincts, his ungovernable temper, his hatred of
authority and love of violent pleasures, had been born with him and had
led him on to the ship-wreck of his life.
Only the love of a good woman could save him, Mrs. Vandeleur had said.
But good women looked at him with the eyes of Lina Grahame.
"Curse her!" he muttered, as he tossed down the raw spirit in his
glass. "I wish, with all my soul, that I could do her an injury!"