Kitabı oku: «Laurel Vane; or, The Girls' Conspiracy», sayfa 6

CHAPTER XIX

Laurel drew back on the threshold, fearful of interrupting the singer, but Mrs. Le Roy had already perceived her, and came forward with considerable empressement to draw her into the room and introduce her.

"Miss Gordon, Count Fitz John," she said, and with a gasp as if some one had thrown cold water over her, the false Beatrix Gordon found herself bowing to a real, live French count.

Her trepidation passed away in a moment. The count was not at all imposing—a good-looking young fellow enough, but St. Leon Le Roy overtopped him by head and shoulders in size and manly beauty. Laurel sat down, shyly conscious of his palpable admiration, and when the song had come to an end she was presented to the singer.

A shimmer of azure silk, a gleam of jewels, a waft of overpowering perfume, and Laurel dared raise her eyes to the beautiful blonde face with its turquois blue eyes, its pink cheeks, and smiling lips, a halo of pale golden hair framing it all and lending an air of infantile innocence to its beauty. She looked very young, and she was smaller than Laurel—a wax doll, dainty and diminutive, and with a smile as sweet and inane. She did not look like a widow. It seemed strange to call her Mrs. Merivale.

The blue eyes, for all their infantile softness, gave Laurel a piercing take-you-in-at-a-glance look, as they touched each other's hands.

"A dark-eyed blonde—labeled dangerous!" said Mrs. Merivale to herself enviously, and feeling for a moment doubtful over the effect of her own elaborate costume as compared with this pure white robe with its vivid garniture of roses.

But, in a moment, her natural vanity reasserted itself. She concluded to be gracious.

"I am so glad to know you, Miss Gordon. I have heard of you in New York, although rumor did not credit you with half the charms I find you in actual possession of," she twittered, sweetly. "Will you come to the piano and play for us? I am so fond of music?"

"I do not play," Laurel answered, feeling the warm color flood her cheeks under the lady's astonished gaze.

"Not play! Why, surely—" began Mrs. Merivale, but to Laurel's intense relief dinner was announced, and she was spared the expression of the lady's surprise at her ignorance.

Yet she looked at the pearl keys longingly as she swept past the grand piano on the count's arm. She had a great passionate love for the divine art of music, and a great grief filled her soul at the thought that her hands had no power to wake the soul of harmony slumbering in those silent keys.

"Poor papa! I wish that he had taught me more of music and less of languages," she thought, regretfully.

Yet, when at dinner they talked in the French language out of compliment to the polite count, she was glad that she could hold her own among them. She felt rather than saw, St. Leon's surprise, and Mrs. Merivale's dismay.

"So she can speak French like a native, although she cannot play—curious!" said the latter to herself, with a feeling of vexation, for she had started the ball of French conversation with a distinct view to Miss Gordon's discomfiture.

Laurel had never seen Mr. Le Roy so brilliant as he was this evening. It seemed that he had never exerted himself for her. He was affable, courteous, fascinating to his visitors, especially so to the lady. He had softly spoken words for her winning smiles that Laurel had never dreamed could curve those sternly set lips. A pang of bitterness pierced the sensitive heart of the lovely young impostor.

"He has never thought Beatrix Gordon worthy of his kind words and smiles," she thought.

He did not think so now it seemed. He did not speak to her, seldom looked at her. His words and looks were lavished on the fair, smiling widow who gave herself up to the flirtation with eager, absorbing interest. The count paid great attention to Laurel, and she tried to look interested in his conversation, but she was glad when the dinner was ended and the ladies passed from the room, leaving the gentlemen to finish their wine.

Mrs. Merivale went to the low window and looked out upon the moonlit balcony.

"How lovely it is!" she cried. "Will you come out, Mrs. Le Roy?—you and Miss Gordon?"

"Beatrix may go—I am afraid of the night air," Mrs. Le Roy responded, settling herself in an easy-chair.

"Will you come, Miss Gordon?" asked the fair widow. "It is too lovely a night to remain indoors," she added, sentimentally.

Laurel went out to her, and Mrs. Merivale drew her ringed hand lovingly through the girl's arm.

"Let us go out and gather some roses with the moonlight and dew upon them. They will be so sweet," she said, winningly. "And, please, will you call me Maud, and let me call you Beatrix? We are both too young to be ceremonious with each other."

They went down into the graveled paths where the September moonlight shone clear and white, and then Maud Merivale seemed to forget all about the roses.

"Ma chère, I am dying to know how you like the count!" she cried.

"He is very nice, I suppose," said Laurel, vaguely, her thoughts elsewhere.

"'Very nice'—oh, dear, what faint praise for my gallant adorer!" laughed the lady. "Why, my dear Beatrix, all the girls in New York vote him a love, a darling, an Adonis, and above all, a splendid catch! They are all jealous of me! Any one of them could willingly cut my ears off for having taken him captive!"

"Then you are to marry him?" said innocent Laurel, taking a vague pleasure in the thought as suggested by the lady's words.

"Cela depend. I can marry him if I choose," laughed the lady. "You must have observed how devoted he is."

Laurel had not observed it; but she wisely said nothing.

Maud Merivale shook her golden frizzes in the moonlight.

"I shall not marry him. It is useless his breaking his heart over me," she said. "I am too true to my old love."

"Your dead husband," Laurel said, gently.

"Pshaw, Beatrix"—impatiently—"what are you talking of? Do you not know that Mr. Merivale was an old man? It was not at all a love match: it was because he was rich."

"Pardon," Laurel murmured, faintly, and she recalled to herself, as she often did, Clarice's favorite song of "Dollars and Dimes."

"It is all right. The old man died soon, and left me a fortune," said the young widow, heartlessly. "But as for loving him, or having any sentimental tendresse over his memory—pshaw, I am not such a little simpleton as that, my dear! no one could expect it," plaintively. "Beatrix," this with startling suddenness—"tell me what do you think of your host—of St. Leon Le Roy?"

CHAPTER XX

The change of conversation was so sudden that Laurel started and shivered uncomfortably.

"Are you cold, my dear?" asked Maud Merivale.

"I felt chilly for a moment," Laurel answered. "It does not matter. You were saying—"

"I asked you what you thought of St. Leon Le Roy, Beatrix. Is he not"—enthusiastically—"grand, handsome, noble—a very king among men?"

Little thrills of icy coldness shot along Laurel's tingling nerves. She remembered his cold, proud bearing to her, as contrasted with his winning and tender demeanor to Maud Merivale that evening. She answered with impulsive bitterness:

"He may be all that to you, Mrs. Merivale, but to me he has always seemed cold, hard, stern!"

"Poor St. Leon!—ah! I know who warped his generous nature so," sighed the lady. "Beatrix, I am so fond of you I have a mind to tell you my story—mine and St. Leon's."

They paced back and forth in the fine, clear moonlight, their rich robes shining in the night: the fragrance of flowers all about them; the sound of the river in their ears. A hand of ice seemed to clutch Laurel's heart in its fierce grasp. She could find no words in which to answer.

"You have heard that we were old friends, St. Leon and I—they have surely told you that, dear," went on Maud Merivale's sweet, insidious voice. "Beatrix, in the olden times, we were more than that—we were lovers."

"Lovers!" echoed Laurel's low, sad voice.

"We were lovers," repeated Mrs. Merivale, in a tone of triumph. "But we were both very young, and—well, old Midas Merivale was even richer than St. Leon. My parents were poor, and so they parted me from my young lover and sold me to that old man for his sordid gold."

There was a plaintive quiver in the cooing voice, and Laurel's heart suddenly went out to the lovely victim in tender sympathy.

"After my marriage I did not see St. Leon for years," continued the sweet tones. "But they told me he had changed—that he had grown hard, cynical, cold—that he cared nothing for women save to rail at them. But I am free at last—and you see for yourself that he unbends to me as to none other. The old love still burns in his heart. I shall win him back, Beatrix, and this time no one shall come between us!"

"Maud," called a strong, sweet voice, coming down the marble steps.

"I am here, St. Leon," she answered back, gladly. "This pretty Beatrix here promised me some roses all sweet with moonlight and dew, but she has not given me one. You shall give them to me, St. Leon."

He came out to them, his handsome dark head bare in the moonlight, a smile in his eyes and on his lips—subtly sweet and dangerous as he sometimes willed it to be.

"Miss Gordon, will you go into the house with the count and my mother?" he said, looking straight into the girl's dark eyes. "I will find the roses 'all sweet with moonlight and dew.'"

Laurel bowed silently and turned away. She did not turn her head, but she knew that the widow had taken St. Leon's arm and was walking across the velvety greensward with him. The echo of firm tones and happy laughter floated back to her.

She did not go back to the count and Mrs. Le Roy as she had been bidden at once. She sat down at the foot of the marble steps and laid her hot brow wearily down on the cold white stone.

"Their words hurt me here," she murmured, pressing her small hand on her beating heart. "But I cannot understand why it should be so. Why should their love pain me? I care nothing for either of them. They are nothing to me. But, oh! this terrible pain at my heart—what does it mean?"

The slight form shivered and trembled, the beautiful face was deathly white in the moonlight. She rested there silently a long time, looking down with sharpened mental vision into her own heart.

And suddenly a moan of intense self-scorn and bitter despair trembled over the beautiful girlish lips.

"I have been willfully blind; I have not understood till now," she moaned. "But, by the flash of jealousy and grief, I have seen my heart. Clarice was right, and I spoke falsely when I denied her. I love him—that haughty, handsome man, who has never given me one thought—who belongs to Maud Merivale. That is why I risked all to remain at Eden! Oh, God! how hard it is to read my own heart first by its jealousy and aching!"

And the night winds and the river echoed her faint, despairing moan.

CHAPTER XXI

After a little she dragged herself up wearily, and went back to the drawing-room. The young count brightened visibly at her appearance. Mrs. Le Roy told her that she had stayed out too long in the night air and dew.

"You look as cold and white as the moonlight," she said.

Laurel made her some careless answer and sat down. Count Fitz John engaged her in conversation. He was delighted to find some one who could converse fairly in his native tongue, and he never wearied of gazing on her rare type of beauty, and her tasteful dress that appealed so forcibly to his artistic eye. He admired her, perhaps, all the more that she piqued him a little by her quietness and girlish dignity. She was not flattered by his notice as other girls were. On the contrary, if he had not been rather self-conceited, he must have seen that she was decidedly bored.

St. Leon and his fair guest came in almost an hour later. Laurel did not look up at their entrance, though she felt her cheeks growing hot, with the bitter wonder that was in her mind.

Did St. Leon Le Roy suspect that she cared for him? Had he fathomed the secret of her heart before she really understood it herself? Was that the secret of his coldness, his almost harshness to her? Had he used

 
"This rough discourtesy
To break or blunt her passion?"
 

The hot color flashed into her sensitive face. She tried not to hear his clear, firm voice, as he talked to Mrs. Merivale. To drown those tones, she was obliged to listen attentively to the count, and to talk more herself. She roused herself to almost vivacity. She would be gay. No one should guess how her heart was bleeding. She succeeded so well in her efforts that the Frenchman was delighted. He thought that he had at last begun to make an impression on the lovely girl, and Laurel, never glancing toward the others did not know with what a frowning brow St. Leon watched her apparent coquetries.

But the interminable evening was over at last. Laurel could never have told how she got through it, but at last they had all gone to their rooms, and Laurel stood before the long glittering mirror in her dressing-room gazing with sad eyes and trembling lips at the face reflected there as at a new creature—a girl who for three months had been living a strange unconscious love-dream, and who had first found out that she had a heart by its bitter aching.

 
"Why did she love him? Curious fool, be still;
Is human love the growth of human will?"
 

Self-scorn and self-pity struggled together in her heart. She felt with a great throb of bitter shame that she had given her love unsought, unvalued, and to another woman's lover. Maud Merivale's words rang in her ears:

"I shall win him back, and this time no one shall come between us."

"He belongs to Maud Merivale. What matter? He never could have been mine," she said, to the white-faced, dark-eyed girl gazing back at her from the mirror with the red roses dying on her breast.

Yesterday she had been reading in a book in the library some pretty verses written over just such a mad and foolish love as this of hers. A fancy seized her to read them again in the light of this new revelation that had flashed upon her heart.

"I will slip down to the library and bring the book," she said, gliding out into the hall and down the broad stairway, shrinkingly, like a little white ghost.

The library was deserted, but the shaded reading-lamp still burned over the center-table with its litter of books and magazines.

The marble busts and statuettes against the book-lined walls looked grimly down upon her, this fair, golden-haired girl with that look of tragic sorrow on her pale face.

"He has been here," she murmured, softly, noting the faint fragrance of cigar smoke that pervaded the air.

She sat down in the great cushioned reading-chair and then she saw another token of his presence—a knot of golden pansies he had worn in his button-hole that evening, and which now lay carelessly on the floor at her feet. She would never have guessed that he had thrown them there in passionate disdain because Maud Merivale's hand had pinned them on his breast.

Laurel picked up the poor dying flowers and held them tenderly.

"You have been near the rose," she murmured, and pressed them to her lips in sudden, passionate love and sorrow. She could not help it. They spoke to her so plainly of the proud man who had won her heart all unwittingly. They made her think of the princely form, the dark, luring, splendid face, the proud, cynical, dark eyes, the curling lips like that once or twice only she had seen curved into a beautiful smile, subtly sweet and dangerous, which women had worshiped blindly, but which only shone upon them to betray their hopes to ruin.

She held the flowers, kissed them again and again, then threw them far from her in a sudden revulsion of feeling bordering on supreme self-contempt.

"Ah, if I could throw my hopeless passion from me thus lightly," she sighed.

She found the book she wished, and, tempted by the deep silence and quiet of the room, decided to remain awhile at least. With her fair head resting on her arm she began to read aloud softly, after an old habit of hers:

 
"'You walk the sunny side of fate,
The wise world smiles and calls you great.
The golden fruitage of success
Drops at your feet in plenteousness;
And you have blessings manifold;
Renown and power and friends and gold,
They build a wall between us twain
That may not be thrown down again.
Alas! for I the long time through
Have loved you better than you knew.'"
 

Suddenly a sweet, chilly breath of night air blew over her. She looked up and saw St. Leon Le Roy parting the heavy curtains of silk and lace at the bay-window behind which he had been quietly sitting smoking a cigar.

Bewildered, startled, Laurel threw down her book and sprung up in ignominious flight.

The master of Eden coolly caught her hands and forced her back into her seat.

"Why need you always fly from me as though I were an ogre?" he said, plaintively. "I shall not eat you, child, tempted as I might be to do so."

"I—I thought myself alone," she stammered, crimsoning under his mocking raillery.

"There is no harm done," he answered, drawing up a chair in front of her and gazing at her with the same slow, sweet smile he had worn when he bade her return to his mother and the count that evening. "I was smoking at the window when you first came in, and I thought at first I would be still and not disturb you, thinking you would go in a moment. But you stayed, and—I changed my mind."

Fancying some covert meaning in his words, she answered, quickly:

"But it is late, and indeed I must be going upstairs now."

CHAPTER XXII

St. Leon glanced at his watch.

"No, it is not late—at least, not midnight. Surely you can spare me a few minutes, Miss Gordon. I wish very much to speak to you," he said, almost gravely.

"I cannot imagine why you should wish to speak to me," she began, tremulously.

"Cannot you?" laughing. "Well, suppose I have a mind to lecture you on your frivolity, Miss Gordon? Do you know, I never dreamed what an egregious flirt you were until I saw you bringing the whole battery of your charms to bear on that fascinated Frenchman this evening? Why have you never condescended to me likewise?"

"I deny the imputation. I am not a flirt," she answered, indignantly.

"Then you were in earnest—worse still!" he said, in that light, mocking tone, with his piercing eyes on her burning face. "Beatrix—pardon, Miss Gordon—what would Cyril Wentworth say to that?"

"Nothing! It is no more concern of his," she flashed out, passionately unconscious of the sudden joy that flashed into his eyes.

"Do you mean that you have broken with Wentworth?" he exclaimed.

"Yes," she answered, coldly.

He regarded her suspiciously.

"Do you know that he is gone away?" he asked, doubtfully.

"To Europe—yes, but I do not care!" she answered, out of the recklessness of her despair.

"Do you mean that you love him no longer—that it was a mere child-fancy that absence has cured?" St. Leon asked her, anxiously. She gave him a swift, half-angry glance from her dark eyes.

"I do not know why you should presume to question me so," she said, with a little flash of pride. "But I will answer you, Mr. Le Roy. Yes, it was a mere childish fancy, and I am effectually cured of it. I know now that I never loved Cyril Wentworth in my life."

He bowed his handsome head in graceful acknowledgment.

"Your frankness emboldens me to ask another confidence," he said. "Miss Gordon, tell me the story Mrs. Merivale poured into your sympathetic ear this evening."

She drew back, indignant and amazed.

"Would you ask me to betray a woman's sacred confidence?" she cried.

He laughed aloud—harshly, sneeringly.

"Do you call that confidence which is poured into every stranger's ear? That figment of Maud Merivale's crafty brain?" he cried. "Tell me the pretty fiction she gave you, Miss Gordon, and then you shall hear my side of the story."

"If you wish me to congratulate you, Mr. Le Roy, I will do so now without waiting to hear more," she said, desperately, eager to escape this painful interview.

He caught her hand as she half arose, and gently forced her back to her seat.

"Do not leave me yet," he said. "Pshaw! I know her pitiful stereotyped story! We were lovers once and her parents parted us and sold her to an old man because he was richer than I! Is not that the amount of the pretty idyl, Miss Gordon?"

"Yes," she answered, wonderingly.

"I thought so—I have heard it often before. Now hear my side of the story, child. We were lovers in our young days—that is true. You would not believe that Maud is thirty, would you, Miss Gordon? My mother thought me too young to marry then, and besides, she did not wholly approve of my choice. The end justified her. We postponed the consummation of our bliss until I should come of age. Maud grew impatient. Old Midas Merivale met her, and—pardon the wretched slang, Miss Gordon—she 'went for him' and threw me over! To-night," he resumed, after a moment's pause, "she threw prudence and delicacy to the winds, begging me to forgive her and to take her back to my heart—swore that she had never ceased to love me. Can you guess what answer I made her?"

"No," she faltered, thrilling with interest.

"I told her that since her sin I had scorned all women for her sake—her most of all! I told her that never until now had I met a woman who redeemed the sex in my eyes—a child woman so fair, so innocent, so frank and truthful, that falsehood could not breathe the same air with her—one to whom I gave the strong, passionate love of a man combined with the reverence due to an angel."

He stretched out his arms to her yearningly, his face transfigured with his mighty love.

"Beatrix, I am twice as old as you are, but I love you to madness! I have hated Cyril Wentworth in my bitter jealousy, but that is all past. Thank God, you love him no longer—you are free! Can you love me, Beatrix? Will you be my wife?"

Laurel Vane almost reeled with the suddenness of this perfect joy that had come upon her. She was face to face with the great temptation of her life, but, oh, how powerless, through her passionate love, to fight against it!