Chapter XIV

It seemed to Laline that Wallace Armstrong made no attempt to disguise the look of triumphant delight which spread over his face when she placed her hand in his.

"I was so afraid you wouldn't come!" he murmured.

"I was much pleased to accept your kind invitation," she returned, demurely, while Clare shot a quick glance of jealous inquiry from one to the other.

Miss Cavan could not, however, complain that the companion whose presence she so much objected to endeavoured in any way to outshine her in conversation. Laline scarcely spoke at all during tea, at which meal she presided behind the tea-urn, her manipulation of which filled Wallace with secret rapture. There was something so delightfully domestic in the sight of her slim wrists peeping from her neat blue-serge sleeves as she filled the cups, something so suggestive of honeymoon-breakfasts and little _tête-à-tête_ meals on winter evenings, that it was as much as he could do to refrain from springing from his seat and proposing to her there and then, and prefacing his remarks with a kiss on each enchanting wrist.

Old Mr. Wallace sat stroking his silver-gray beard and gazing with much satisfaction on the assembled guests after they had taken their place round the tea-table. At length he turned to Mrs. Vandeleur, and addressed her in his usual slow tones, marked by a strong Scotch accent.

"I believe, madam," he said, "that I am very much behind the times. But I am an old man, and I live in a very old house and carry on a very old business, and that must be my excuse. My boy Wallace humours me; he knows I like a table to be where I'm used to seeing it--in the middle of the room--and the chairs drawn up round it, and so he puts it there. And now I am wondering whether the two charming young ladies you have brought with you to-day will humour me too?"

"In what, Mr. Armstrong?"

"Would they take off their hats while they are here?" he asked, with a wistful eagerness which touched Laline deeply. "You see," he added, apologetically, "this is not a fashionable call, and there are no fashionable people to meet you. And when I see young people about me without their hats it makes me feel for the time that they are not only visitors, but my own family."

Long before he had finished speaking Laline had removed her hat, much to Wallace's delight, and had confided it to him to place on one side for her, thus enabling him to feast his eyes upon her white brow and soft hair, waving in Madonna-like fashion over her temples and across the tips of her little pink ears.

"Have you no women-relations at all, then?" Mrs. Vandeleur inquired.

Alexander Wallace sighed and shook his head.

"None that I see now," he answered. "Of my twin-sisters, one, this boy's mother, is dead, and the other has married for the second time and lives in South America. Of my two nieces--this boy's sisters--one is dead, and the other married a German baron and lives with him in the Black Forest. I never see any of them. Once, more than four years ago, I expected a daughter to come into my house as my nephew's wife, a gentle and beautiful young girl, whom I longed to welcome to my heart. But it was not to be."

"Don't speak of that now, Uncle Alec," put in Wallace, quickly, throwing an uneasy glance in the direction of his guests; "it only makes you unhappy to recall that time!"

Laline watched both men with a fluttering heart. It was quite clear that Wallace wished to keep his uncle from the topic of the niece who never arrived, and as patent that the old gentleman was anxious to prose on the subject to sympathetic feminine listeners. The younger man at once strove to create a diversion by drawing Mrs. Vandeleur's attention to his sketches on the walls of the room; but old Mr. Wallace, who was very obstinate, returned to his former subject before the little lady had had time to express an opinion.

"This boy thinks of nothing but art and society, spelt with capital letters, you must know, Mrs. Vandeleur!" he broke in, testily. "I am fond of good pictures myself; but pictures won't fill an empty house with sunshine and laughter. That is what this house wants--young voices, music, and pattering feet to drive the ghosts away. My niece Laline would have been twenty-one by this time. I had prepared one entire floor for her at the Hampstead house, as well as three rooms here on the floor below this. Just what I thought a very young newly-married woman would like I put there--the newest novels, and fresh flowers, and pretty hangings, and cut-glass scent-bottles, and plenty of looking-glasses--all pretty girls like looking-glasses, and plain ones, too, for the matter of that. And I bought a canary for her, and a white Persian kitten, and a King Charles spaniel; that was the popular dog that year, and I know girls like pets and prefer them to be in the fashion. Then, when everything was prepared, and I was counting the hours until my nephew brought home his wife, I received a telegram to say that at the moment of starting she had been seized with typhoid fever and was already dangerously ill."

"How terribly sad!" ejaculated Mrs. Vandeleur, politely, while Clare yawned furtively, and Laline kept her eyes fixed on her plate lest they might betray her.

"You are making Mrs. Vandeleur quite miserable, Uncle Alec," put in Wallace, his black brows contracting into an impatient frown.

"My boy," observed his uncle, doggedly, "I am telling a story and I have not yet finished. As you know the end and do not appear to want to hear it again, I should advise you to make a tour of the room with the young ladies and show them your sketches!"

Clare rose with alacrity; but Laline declared that she preferred to listen to Mr. Wallace; so, much against his will, Mr. Armstrong had to pair off with Miss Gavan. Laline could see clearly how he tried to catch his uncle's words, even while conducting Clare round the walls and explaining to her his various drawings; but her interest was so centred in the story told by old Mr. Wallace that she had little attention to spare for his nephew.

"Constant telegrams were sent to me," the old gentleman proceeded, in great satisfaction at securing so absorbed a listener as Laline, "and I was making arrangements for going over to see for myself that the poor girl had the best of nursing, when I received a message telling me that my niece had succumbed to the disease and was already dead. Only seventeen, and a bride of a few weeks! It was indeed a cruel blow! But the part that especially grieved me, and of which I never think without the keenest self-reproach, is that when my nephew first arrived in Europe from the Colonies he was in dire straits for money and too proud to apply to me. His poor little bride had relatives in the town of Boulogne, and thither they made their way; but these relations were extremely poor and could do little for them. One of them, a Captain Garth, wrote me a most touching letter after the poor child's death--which I fear was hastened by the privations she had undergone--in which he detailed her last moments and her pitiful disappointment at not being able to see her beautiful English home. Poor little Laline! No one mourned her more sincerely than I. Her rooms in this house and at Hampstead have never been used since that time, and never will be until my nephew marries."

"You wish him to marry, then?" Mrs. Vandeleur suggested.

"Most earnestly I do. But, though I have nothing to complain of about him, and he is making amends to me in every way for the terrible trouble I have had, he seems strangely averse to settling down, and talks a great deal about failing to meet his ideal, and not being able to put up with any one else, and so on. Young men nowadays are too fond of talking about themselves and their feelings; and this boy is so popular, and gets invited out so much, that in the multitudes of fresh pretty faces he is constantly meeting he is in danger, I fear, of frittering his time away. Boating-parties in summer, perpetual racing and punting, riding, tennis, and golf, and in the winter balls and skating-parties--his time is so filled up that he doesn't have a moment left for love-making. With all that, he's an excellent man of business and invaluable to me at the Bank. Oh, I have nothing to complain of about the boy!"

To Laline's sensitive ears there was something a little disparaging in Alexander Wallace's praise of his nephew, some note which almost suggested that he regretted not being able to find fault with him. For her own part, the knowledge of her husband's deceitful treachery towards his over-indulgent uncle filled her with disgust, and she had been hardly able to restrain her indignation when Alexander Wallace alluded to Captain Garth's "pathetic letter" containing his "niece" Laline's last words. Unable to account for her disappearance, and unwilling to give themselves the trouble of searching for her, it was clear to Laline that her father and her husband had invented the story of her seizure and death by typhoid fever in order to extract further sympathy and further funds from the kind and credulous old banker, and she grew hot with shame to think that she should have almost allowed herself to pardon and to like a man so mercenary and deceitful as Wallace Armstrong must be.

"Would you like to look over the house, Miss Grahame? There are some rather interesting rooms, one especially, in which a great ball was given on the very day when that prodigious swindle, the South Sea Bubble, burst. It is called the 'South Sea Room,' and has a wonderful Chinese paper; I think it would interest you."

It was her husband's voice, and a little shiver of repulsion passed through Laline at the sound. Nevertheless she rose, and Alexander Wallace rose also. Adams, the discreet-looking man-servant, was summoned with his key, and the tour of the old house began.

Clare Cavan was inquisitive. Moreover, she fully intended, if that were possible, installing herself as mistress in this gloomy old mansion at some future date. She therefore peered and peeped about her, noting the size and number of the rooms, and perpetually asking questions in what seemed like overflowing girlish vivacity. Mr. Armstrong's suite of apartments comprised the sitting-room, in which tea had been served, a bedroom and dressing-room adjoining, and up another flight of stairs, a spacious studio, lighted entirely from above, and containing casts, clay models, canvases, easels, and innumerable sketches placed along the dado of the room, the walls of which were painted Indian-red. To this room, at Clare's urgent request, Wallace conducted the two girls, passing, as he did so, the closed door of another attic of equal dimensions.

"Is this another studio of yours?" Clare inquired, stopping before the closed door.

"It is a disused lumber-room," Wallace answered, "and kept locked, as you see," he added, shaking the handle of the door before leading the way into his studio adjoining.

Clare lingered behind the other two and bent to examine the keyhole.

"It may be locked," she said to herself, "but the key is on the inside. I wonder why Mr. Armstrong tried to deceive me? Is it some pretty model he is keeping here on the sly?"

Resolved to settle this point to her own satisfaction so soon as an opportunity should arise, Clare followed the others into the studio, and affected great admiration of Wallace's sketches, which were in truth far too fanciful and unconventional to arouse her interest.

"This is where my heart is," he said to Laline on her first introduction to the studio; "or, rather"--glancing quickly round and perceiving that Clare had not yet joined them--"this is where it was."

Laline glanced at him coldly and turned to examine some drawings. Nothing, she told herself, should ever induce her to forgive him; but his pictures interested her, and especially a pencil sketch, as yet uncompleted, of extreme delicacy and beauty, entitled "Evelyn Hope."

The figure of the dead girl, exquisitely youthful and pure in outline, lay stretched upon the bed, touched and glorified by two long rays of light that stole through the hinges of the close shutters. A dark-haired young man sat, with face averted from the spectator, gazing intently at the still white figure, into whose hand he was gently thrusting a single geranium leaf.

"'So hush--I will give you this leaf to keep!
See--I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There--that is our secret; go to sleep.
You will wake and remember and understand.'"

Wallace came behind Laline as she stood before the easel examining the picture, and softly quoted Browning's lines, which she had never heard before, and which touched her with a keen delight.

"I should like to read you the entire poem," he said.

"But who did you take for your heroine--I mean, who sat for it?"

"No one. It was a memory. I did it on my return from that walk in Kensington Gardens."

He spoke very low, so as not to be heard by Clare, who was at the farther end of the room turning over some sketches in a portfolio against the wall. Laline had already recognised her own profile in "Evelyn Hope," and was not ill-pleased by the dreamy loveliness which characterised the drawing.

She learned that Wallace frequently exhibited at the minor picture-shows, and, further, that he was a regular contributor of black-and-white drawings to more than one English and American magazine.

"You see I can't give the work the time I would like," he explained, "though luckily banking hours are not onerous. I sit down-stairs from ten until four, with a calculating-machine clicking away in my brain; but in the early summer mornings or the long winter evenings I bring my heart and mind up here."

At this point Clare, tired of a conversation which was no longer specially addressed to her, suggested a move to the South Sea Room, which she declared herself "dying to see;" and to the first floor they forthwith descended to a vast apartment, with floor of shining polished oak and an immense mantelpiece in carved and coloured marble, an apartment in which the electric-light, shining down from bosses in the elaborately-carved ceiling, seemed a glaring anachronism, and in which a few old-fashioned chairs and sofas, covered with moth-eaten brocade and set in far corners of the room, suggested ghostly dowagers and wall-flowers silently watching a rustling fleshless ball.

Mrs. Vandeleur was delighted, and went about with upraised eye-glasses, "sniffling the air for ghosts," as Clare irreverently whispered to Wallace Armstrong.

"You have done your very worst," the little lady observed with much severity to old Alexander, "with your odious glaring electric-light. And, as I perceive, some Vandal forefather of yours has gilded and whitened over all the lovely woodwork of the ceiling! As to your dreadful Chinese wall-paper, sticky with varnish and most inartistic and patchy in effect, I haven't a doubt that it is plastered all over the original beautiful oak-panelled walls, and that the spirits of the malevolent little pigtailed horrors who designed and executed it have driven away all the dear, charming, picturesque people in patches and powder and stiff brocade who used to congregate here a hundred years ago. I declare I can hardly hear a rustle of their silk petticoats or a tap of their high-heeled shoes!"

"If you hear as much as that, madam, you are cleverer than I," said the old Scotchman, drily.

"If I had my way with this room," pursued Mrs. Vandeleur, "I'd have all the paper and all the paint and varnish off, and take down your nasty electric-light and substitute wax candles. And I would have an old spinet in the corner and play it softly in the evenings, until I had reconstituted the entire scene. As it is, it hurts me to see a place so desecrated. Is there no corner in the entire house left sacred for the poor spirits to come back to and feel themselves at home?"

But here Adams, who had been listening, equally scared and scandalised, interposed to suggest that if the lady liked old things she might admire the banqueting-hall, which had never yet been "properly restored;" and thither he led the way, followed by Mrs. Vandeleur, still intent upon demonstrating to the old Scotchman his enormities and that of his predecessors in the arrangement of the old rooms.

Laline, who had been examining with interest the odd designs upon the walls, turned to follow her employer; but Clare had already gone out, and Wallace detained her as she tried to pass him.

"Don't go yet!" he whispered, quickly. "I must speak to you. Why are you so cold to me again to-day?"

"Nonsense, Mr. Armstrong! Remember, we are strangers."

"We are not! Feel my heart!"--and, suddenly seizing her hand, he pressed it against his heart, so that she felt its quick strong throbs. "Could a stranger make my heart beat like this? Miss Grahame--Lina----Oh, I don't mind if you are angry! You are Lina to me in my thoughts and dreams. Lina, why do you try so hard to hate me? For you are trying; I can see it in your eyes, which seek mine until you hastily avert them; I can feel it in your hand, which half returns my pressure before you snatch your fingers from me. Lina, why do you try to steel your heart against me? What have I done, dear, that you should refuse to follow your heart and love me as I love you?"