Kitabı oku: «Laurel Vane; or, The Girls' Conspiracy», sayfa 4

CHAPTER XI

If Laurel Vane was thunderstruck at the unexpected sight of the villain who had so deeply insulted her helpless innocence in New York, Ross Powell on the other hand was delighted. His bold eyes gleamed with evil joy, his thin lips curled in a mocking smile.

"Miss Vane," he exclaimed, "is it possible that I find you again after all my fruitless search? But I might have known that such an angel would fly to Eden!"

Horror unutterable had seized upon Laurel. The song had died on her lips, the color fled from her face, she stared at her foe with parted lips, from which the breath came in palpitating gasps, while her wide, terrified eyes had the anguished look of some hunted creature.

He had come to betray her, she said to herself. All was ended now. He had found her out. He would tell the Le Roys who she was, and how she had deceived them. She could fancy Mrs. Le Roy's scathing words of condemnation. She could imagine the lightning scorn in St. Leon's proud, cold eyes.

Stifling the moan upon her lips, she cried out in passionate despair:

"Ross Powell, what has brought you here?"

"I might ask you the same question," he returned, coolly. "It certainly never entered my mind that I should find the daughter of Louis Vane a visitor at Eden."

He had spoken unwarily. His words let in a sudden light upon her mind.

He had not traced her here then. Whatever had brought him to Eden it had been some other cause than the denunciation of Beatrix Gordon's plot.

Her heart leaped with hope, then sunk heavily again. He was here, and he would find her out. She could trust to his hate and his desire for vengeance for that.

Obeying a sudden, desperate impulse, she pushed open the gate and stepped out into the road.

"You are right," she said, bitterly. "Do you think that the proud, rich Le Roys would have Laurel Vane for their guest? My errand at Eden is done, Mr. Powell. Let me pass, if you please."

He stood before her, dumbfounded at her coolness, glancing from her pale, agitated face to the flowers she carried in her apron with ostentatious care.

"Your errand," he stammered. "The flowers?"

"Yes," she answered, calmly. "I must take them home. Will you please to stand out of the way, Mr. Powell?"

"One moment," he said, still hindering her way. "Where is your home? Where can I find you?"

Her eyes flashed scornfully upon him.

"What can it matter to you?" she said. "Do you think I would receive you in my home? You, the cowardly insulter of helpless girlhood? Never! I hate you as I hate the slimy, crawling serpent! You have nothing to do with me. Out of my way!"

He caught her fiercely by the arm and hissed:

"I shall find you out! Be sure of that, my incarnation of indignant virtue! And when I do, Laurel Vane, you shall find that the serpent you hate can sting!"

She tried to shake off the brutal grasp of his fingers, but he held her in a grasp of steel and would not let her go.

"You hurt me," she said, desperately. "Release my arm, Ross Powell, or I will scream for help. I hear carriage-wheels coming. Whoever it is I will appeal for protection."

The threat had the hoped-for effect. He threw her arm from him with a smothered oath. Laurel pushed quickly past him and walked on down the road. A carriage rattled past, and under cover of the cloud of dust it raised she looked furtively back at her worsted foe. He had entered the gate of Eden and was walking slowly up the graveled path to the house.

"He is really going there," she said, trembling, "and, O Heaven, upon what mission? He is Mr. Gordon's clerk, and he has come upon some errand to Beatrix Gordon. They will send out to search for me, and he will learn the truth. I cannot go back. I am afraid! I must hide myself until he is gone!"

Her trembling limbs would scarcely support her, but she walked on as fast as she could, her mind filled with vague conjectures and dire suspicions.

"Perhaps Mr. Gordon has sent for Beatrix to return home," she thought, despairingly. "Then the conspiracy will all be discovered. I shall be driven away from beautiful Eden."

A pang like a dagger's thrust pierced her heart at the thought. She looked back at the towered and turreted mansion, and the beautiful extensive grounds, with something of that hopeless despair our first mother must have felt on leaving Paradise.

The scent of the flowers she carried filled her with keenest pain.

"Shall I ever dare go back?" she said. "Am I going away for the last time now, with no home, no friends to turn to in my despair—with nothing but these flowers, and—a memory?"

As she plodded slowly along she came to a little private gate in the rustic fence that inclosed Eden. It led into a picturesque, bosky dell, with running streams, leafy shades, cool, green turf, and beds of wild flowers and exquisite ferns. The master of Eden carried the key to this private entrance, often preferring it to the more ostentatious front gate, with its imposing lions keeping grim watch and ward.

Laurel paused and leaned her arms on the low fence, and gazed at the cool light and shade that flickered on the green grass beneath the waving boughs of the trees. The hot, dusty road was disagreeable. She longed to go inside and throw herself down to rest. No one from the house ever came here except St. Leon Le Roy, and he but seldom. It was a favorite haunt of Laurel's, and it struck her now that it would be an excellent hiding-place.

Sighing at its inaccessibility Laurel bowed her head on her hands, and the first thing that caught the sight of her downcast eyes was the glitter of the steel key on the inside of the gate, where Mr. Le Roy had inadvertently left it that morning.

With a cry of joy Laurel slipped her hand through the iron bars of the gate, unlocked it, and entered.

Then she hastened to the remotest retreat on the grounds, a little natural bower, formed by the thick interlacing boughs of the trees and vines that grew thickly and luxuriantly close by a clear meandering stream, rippling on with a pleasant murmur. Laurel threw herself down at the foot of a tree in this sylvan retreat, and leaning her head on her hand, listened pensively to the song of the birds and the musical murmur of the little streamlet. Her heart beat more calmly in the solitude and stillness that was only broken by the sweet sounds of nature. A little hope flickered feebly to life in her breast.

"Clarice is so clever she will save me, perhaps," she whispered to herself.

CHAPTER XII

In the meantime Ross Powell with his mind full of his rencounter with Laurel, and his passions all aflame with love and hate commingled, wended his way to the stately home of the Le Roys.

It was true as Laurel had conjectured that he had come on business with Beatrix Gordon, but the sudden, exciting meeting with the dead author's daughter had almost driven his employer's business out of his mind. He determined to get through this interview with Miss Gordon as soon as possible, that he might gain time to trace the scornful Laurel to her home.

His disappointment was accordingly great when he was informed that Miss Gordon had gone for a walk. On his polite intimation that he had but an hour to remain Clarice was sent out to bring her mistress in.

Pretty, clever Clarice, having informed herself as to the identity of the visitor, departed on her errand, her quick brain teeming with plans to avoid the threatened exposure.

And Ross Powell waited his little hour, and saw the sunset gleams kindling the waves of the Hudson with gold, and still she came not. Impatience burned to fever-heat in his breast, though he was outwardly calm and deferentially polite to Mrs. Le Roy and her stately son.

The master of Eden inspired him with some little awe. He shrunk from the keen, clear glances of the cynical dark eyes. They seemed to pierce through him and read his shallow, selfish nature to the core. He felt his own littleness by contrast with the calm, proud bearing of St. Leon Le Roy, and resented it with carefully concealed anger.

While he waited for Miss Gordon's coming, he ventured nonchalantly on one leading question.

Could they tell him if there was a young lady staying in the neighborhood named Laurel Vane?

"Laurel Vane—what a sweet, pretty name," said Mrs. Le Roy. "No, I do not believe there is. I have never heard the name before."

"It is possible that she may be occupying some subordinate position—a governess, perhaps," suggested Mr. Powell.

"I do not know, I have never heard of her," said the hostess, carelessly; then, appealing to her son, "Have you, St. Leon?"

And he, in his blindness, answered:

"No."

Ross Powell did not know how to believe them. Had he not met her coming out of their grounds, loaded with their rare flowers? He asked himself what interest these rich people had in deceiving him about Laurel Vane. While he puzzled over the question a sudden solution presented itself to his mind. She must be figuring under an assumed name. These rich Le Roys could have had no interest in deceiving him about humble little Laurel Vane.

He did not know how nearly his chance conjecture had hit the mark.

But his suspicions made him all the more eager to get away and seek for her. If she had really been clever enough to hide herself under a fictitious name, she would be all the harder to find. The difficulty only made him more zealous in pursuit.

He assumed an air of polite regret, and began to pave his way to departure.

"I am afraid I cannot await Miss Gordon's return any longer this evening, as I have a friend waiting for me at the hotel," he said. "But indeed there is no real necessity that I should see her at all beyond the pleasure her father would experience in hearing that I had done so. I will call again in the morning, and perhaps find her at home. In the meantime," he drew two letters and a small package from his breast, "I am the bearer of a letter to you, Mrs. Le Roy, and one for Miss Gordon, with this packet and her father's love. I shall be pleased to receive your answer in the morning before I return to New York."

He presented them and bowed himself out, so eager to find Laurel Vane that he gave scarcely a thought to Miss Gordon's defection.

The deepening twilight fell, and still neither Clarice nor her mistress returned.

Mrs. Le Roy began to feel some little anxiety.

"She never stayed out like this before," she said to St. Leon. "Can she have eluded us, and eloped with her lover? I am afraid I have allowed her too much liberty. What do you think, St. Leon?"

There was a gloomy flash in his eyes, but before he could speak Clarice came running in, breathless and eager, with genuine alarm on her face.

"Has he gone?" she gasped.

"An hour ago," said Mrs. Le Roy. "Where is Miss Gordon, Clarice?"

"Oh, Mrs. Le Roy, I cannot find her anywhere," gasped the girl, in a frightened tone.

CHAPTER XIII

There was genuine alarm on the maid's pretty, intelligent face. Mrs. Le Roy was startled.

"Have you been all over the grounds? Are you sure you have looked everywhere?" she cried.

"Oh, ma'am, I do not think I have missed a single spot," cried Clarice, wringing her hands. "I have been all over Eden. I have been out into the road, and along the river bank. I am afraid she has thrown herself into the water!"

St. Leon looked at her with his piercing dark eyes.

"Why should she do that?" he asked her, sharply.

"Oh, sir, surely you know she was very unhappy," she faltered.

"About her lover?" asked Mrs. Le Roy.

"Ye—es, madam," faltered the maid, weakly.

St. Leon had crossed to the door. He came back and laid his strong protecting hand gently on his mother's shoulder, and looked down into her troubled face.

"Mother, do not be frightened," he said. "I will find Beatrix for you. Ring for lights, and let Clarice stay here with you. I will search for the child."

The words kindled a gleam of hope in her breast. She did not see how deathly white his own face had grown.

He left her, and went out into the grounds on his self-appointed mission of finding the missing girl. A new moon had risen, piercing the twilight darkness with shafts of mellow light. In its mystic rays the white graveled walks and groups of marble statuary glimmered ghostly pale and wan. Clarice's apprehensive words rang in his ears:

"I am afraid she has thrown herself into the water."

"Not that—oh, not that," he said to himself.

He left the more open grounds and went out into the thick shrubberies. The dew was falling heavily, and the fragrance of flowers was borne on the air. The almost oppressive sweetness of the tube-rose, then at the height of its blooming, stole gently on his senses, but ever afterward it was connected in his mind with a sense of loss and pain.

"Beatrix, Beatrix!" he called ever and anon, in his eager search, but no sweet voice replied, no slender, white-clad form bounded out from among the dark green trees. He felt a strange sense of dreariness in his search for Cyril Wentworth's missing love.

"She was very unhappy—I had begun to forget that," he said to himself. "She had changed so much I thought she was beginning to forget that episode with Cyril Wentworth. Was her apparent indifference only a clever mask? Has she fled with him?"

He crushed something like a bitter execration between his lips at the thought, and went on crashing madly through the shrubbery, and so came out into the quiet dell where Beatrix had hidden that evening in her frantic dread of Ross Powell.

He followed the course of the little singing stream that tried to tell him in its musical murmur, "She is here, she is here," but he was deaf to Nature's voice. His heart's cry drowned it.

"Why am I seeking her here?" he muttered, bitterly. "My mother was right. She has had too much liberty. Cyril Wentworth has stolen her away."

Nay, a sudden lance-like gleam of the silvery moonlight broke through the interlacing boughs of the trees and touched with a pencil of light a little white heap of something huddled under the bowering trees. He went nearer, knelt down, and a cry of joy broke from his stern, mustached lips.

CHAPTER XIV

She had not thrown herself into the river, she had not fled with her lover. He had wronged her in his thoughts. She was here. Like a weary child she had flung herself down with her pale cheek pillowed on one round, white arm, and was sleeping deeply, exhaustedly, with the flowers all fallen from her apron and strewed in odorous confusion about her.

He bent his dark head low over the golden one—perhaps to listen if she slept—some murmured words fell from his lips. They sounded like "My darling," but it must have been the wind sighing in the leaves above them, or, perchance, the musical ripple of the little streamlet. St. Leon Le Roy was too proud and cold for such a weakness.

But he did not awake her at once. He bent over her softly, and the shapely hand with its costly diamond flashing in the moonlight, moved gently over the waving ripples of golden hair in mute caress as though she had been a child.

How still and pale she lay. The white radiance of the moonlight made her look so cold and white it thrilled him with a strange terror.

"What if it were death?" he muttered, darkly, with a shiver. "Death? Well," with a sudden, baleful fierceness, "what then? Better death than surrender her to Cyril Wentworth!"

And a red-hot flame of jealousy tore his heart asunder like the keen blade of a dagger.

He gazed for a moment in almost sullen satisfaction on the white, sleeping face, then suddenly his mood changed. Something like fear and dread came into his eyes.

"Am I mad?" he asked himself, with a bitter self-reproach in his voice, and he shook her gently, while almost unconsciously he called her name aloud:

"Beatrix—darling!"

With a start she opened her eyes. She saw him bending over her with an inscrutable expression upon his face. It was frowning, fierce, almost bitterly angry. Yet all the summer night around her, her languid pulses, and her beating heart, seemed to thrill and echo to one sweet, fierce whisper. "Darling!" Had she dreamed it? Was it but the figment of her slumbering brain?

As she struggled up she put out her hands to shut out the sight of his face that seemed to frown darkly upon her. A cry broke from her lips, full of fear and deprecation.

"Do not be angry. Do not scold me!" she wailed. "I am very sorry—I—I will go away!"

"She is not half awake—she is dreaming," he said to himself, and he touched her again, gently. "Wake up, Miss Gordon," he said; "you are dreaming. I am not going to scold you, although you have given us all a terrible scare falling asleep in the grounds at this hour of the evening."

The somber, black eyes stared at him affrightedly. She did not comprehend him yet.

"Oh, Mr. Le Roy, has he told you all?" she cried, clasping her small hands tightly in the agony of her excitement. "Do you hate me, despise me? Must I go away, all alone," with a shudder, "into the dark, dark night?"

"Still dreaming," said St. Leon Le Roy to himself, and with a sudden impulse of pity he bent down, put his arms about the small white figure, and lifted her up to her feet. Then holding her gently in the clasp of one arm, he said, like one soothing a frightened child:

"You have been asleep, Miss Gordon, and your dreams were wild. Rouse yourself now, and come into the house with me. My mother is greatly frightened at your absence!"

"Frightened," she repeated, a little vaguely, and nestling unconsciously nearer to the warm, strong arm that held her.

"Yes, you have been missing several hours, and we have all had a great fright about you. Clarice searched for you several hours, but I had the happiness of finding you," he said, gently.

"And—nothing has happened? You are not angry?" she asked, the mists beginning to clear from her brain.

"Nothing has happened, except that a gentleman came to see you and went away disappointed. I am not angry, yet I ought to be, seeing what a fright you gave me. Only think of me, Miss Gordon, rushing about the garden with my mind full of 'dire imaginings,' and finding you asleep on the grass like a tired baby. What a descent from the sublime to the ridiculous!"

She began to comprehend all and drew herself, with a blush, from the arm that still held her gently.

"Pardon me. You were half asleep and I held you to keep you from falling," he said, with cool dignity. "Shall we return to the house now? My mother is in great suspense."

"I am very sorry," she began, penitently, as she moved on quietly by his side. "I did not mean to frighten any one. You—you were very kind to come and look for me."

In her heart she was secretly singing pæans of gladness. She was not discovered yet. Her clever move that evening had thrown her enemy off his guard. Trying to keep the tremor out of her voice, she asked with apparent carelessness:

"Who was my visitor, Mr. Le Roy?"

"Whom do you imagine?" he responded.

"Was—was it Mr. Wentworth?" she inquired, with artless innocence and something in her voice that he interpreted as hope and longing.

"Do you suppose that Mr. Wentworth would be admitted inside the doors of Eden?" he inquired, with grim anger.

"Why not?" said she, timidly.

"You must know that we have our instructions from your mother," he answered, stiffly.

Laurel decided that it would be in keeping with her character of Beatrix Gordon to argue the point a little with Mr. Le Roy.

"Do you not think that mamma is a little harsh, Mr. Le Roy?" she ventured, timidly. "Mr. Wentworth is good and noble and handsome. His only fault is that he is poor."

"Therefore, he is no mate for you," St. Leon answered, almost savagely.

"But why?" she persisted, longing to hear his opinion on the subject.

"You are almost too young to understand these questions, Miss Gordon, but it ought to be perfectly obvious to you that the wealthy well-born daughter of Mr. Gordon should not descend to a simple clerk without connections, without money, and without prospects," he answered, almost brusquely.

"Must one take no account of love?" she asked, timidly.

"Unequal marriages seldom result happily, Miss Gordon," he said, his voice full of underlying bitterness.

"You would have the rich to always wed the rich then?" she said, smothering a long, deep, bitter sigh as she awaited his answer.

"Other things being equal—yes," he responded, cruelly, and for a time they walked on silently through the moonlit paths with the thick shrubberies casting fantastic shadows along their way. St. Leon was in a savage mood, Laurel in a bitter one. She was silently recalling her maid's favorite song:

 
"Dimes and dollars, dollars and dimes!
An empty pocket is the worst of crimes.
If a man's down, give him a thrust—
Trample the beggar into the dust!
Presumptuous poverty is quite appalling—
Knock him over! Kick him for falling!
Dimes and dollars, dollars and dimes,
An empty pocket is the worst of crimes!"
 

"The popular creed—why should I try to fight against it?" she asked herself, with a sinking heart. She looked up into the dark, stern face beside her. "Then I need never ask you to feel sorry for us—you will never help us to happiness—poor Cyril and me!" she said.

His dark eyes flashed.

"You do not know what you are talking about, Miss Gordon!" he said, almost savagely. "No; never ask me to help you to happiness with Cyril Wentworth. I would sooner see you dead!"

She shrunk back appalled at his burst of resistless passion.

"He is hard and cruel, proud as Lucifer, and cold as ice," she sighed, inly. "I was mad to dream that he called me darling in my sleep! One of those stars will sooner fall from the heavens than that he should descend to Laurel Vane!"

They were at the foot of the marble steps now. Just touching her arm, he led her up to the door, and turned away.

"You may go in alone and tell them the ridiculous finale to our grand scare—that you had simply fallen asleep on the grass," he said, in a brusque, careless tone. "I shall go down to the river and smoke my cigar."

And no wildest stretch of her girlish fancy could have made her believe that St. Leon Le Roy went back to the place where he had found her sleeping; that he took into his hands some of the scattered, forgotten flowers, on which her arm and cheek had lain; that he kissed them, and hid them in his breast, and then—almost cursed himself for his folly.

"I, St. Leon Le Roy, whom the fairest, proudest women in the world have loved vainly!" he cried, "I, to make myself a dolt over another man's baby-faced, childish sweetheart!"