Chapter XV

A sudden rage seized Laline against both Wallace and herself. She hated herself for tolerating and even liking him, and she hated him for what she regarded as his unparalleled duplicity.

"You are asking me a great many questions!" she said, turning a white, angry face upon him. "Now I want to question you! Tell me, if you have the slightest regard for truth--do you know of no tie, no responsibility, which should prevent you from making love to me?"

"What do you mean?" he asked, falling back a step and speaking in low troubled tones, quite unlike the passionate accents of his first love-avowal.

"You answer my question by asking another!" she exclaimed, stamping her foot impatiently. "What I want you to tell me is this--is there nothing and no one to stand between us--no barrier which should keep you and me apart?"

The flush of excitement faded from his dark face, which in a moment seemed to age and grow stern and sad. For the first time he averted his eyes from hers.

"What have you heard?" he asked, abruptly.

"Tell me the truth," she said, "and then I will tell you whether it is what I have heard."

He looked at her doubtfully.

"It is for you to decide," he said at last, in a very low voice. "If what you have learned about a tie, a responsibility, which I undertook more than four years ago, is sufficient to part us, I must bow to your decision. I cannot undo what I have done."

"You are not free!" she whispered, as he turned away.

"I am free to love you!" he cried, suddenly clasping her hands in his and drawing them up against his heart again. "Lina, we can't talk here, and I can see that we have both much to say. On Saturday your time is your own, is it not? Well, Saturday next I will come to you so soon as you are free. What time shall it be? Two o'clock or half-past two? Fix the time, or I shall burst in before you have finished luncheon!"

"You cannot come to the house for me," exclaimed Laline--"it is out of the question! What do you imagine you could say to Mrs. Vandeleur and her niece to explain such conduct--'If you please, ma'am, I understand it's your secretary's afternoon out, and I've come to take her out walking?' Do you really suppose that earning one's living quite destroys one's sense of what is due to the position of a lady?"

"Don't be angry, Lina," he was beginning, when she cut him short again.

"I will not permit you to call me by my Christian name, Mr. Armstrong!"

"As you like. At what time shall I call for you on Saturday?"

"Call for me? It is out of the question! I would not for the world let Mrs. Vandeleur know of your silly conduct!"

"Well, we'll keep her in the dark at present, if you wish it, although I would far rather go direct to her and tell her I fell in love with you at first sight. I feel sure she'd sympathise. I'll be waiting, then, just by the little gate that leads into the Gardens--the gate by which we came out last time. At two o'clock I will be there; and, if you are not there by the half-hour, I will go to the house and ask for you."

"This is persecution----"

"No--it is love! Lina, I hear footsteps on the stairs. There is no real barrier between us. In another moment we shall be interrupted. Kiss me, dear--just once first!"

"Mr. Armstrong, you are insulting!"

He bent his handsome, eager, dark face close down towards her own; and that ill-regulated little heart of hers began to tremble and flutter as though this man were not a heartless deceiver and an utterly worthless person.

After all he was her husband, and kissing one's husband is not considered a crime; added to which, she was almost afraid she loved him a little. Half insensibly her head inclined towards his, and in another moment their lips would have met, when Clare Cavan darted at astonishing speed into the room, and stood before them, wide-eyed and panting, her brilliant flesh-tints changed for a chalky pallor, and abject fear clearly marked in every line of her face.

"I've had a fright!" she faltered. "I--I wanted to have another look at these lovely sketches of yours, Mr. Armstrong; so I stole up-stairs to the top floor by myself, and--somehow I had forgotten--and I opened the wrong door!"

"The wrong door?" Wallace repeated, with a clearly startled expression in his eyes. "Do you mean that you went into the lumber-room? Wasn't the door locked?"

"Yes--no--that is to say, I fell over a box or something near the door, and slipped and hurt myself in the dark! And, being very absurdly nervous, it gave me such a shock!"

Laline glanced at Clare and then at Mr. Armstrong. It was clear that Clare was lying, and equally clear that he knew it. There was nothing for him to do, however, but to express his regret at her accident, and to suggest that a glass of wine or a little brandy might assist in restoring her nerves--a proposition to which Clare assented without much protest; and the three proceeded to the dining-room together.

Here they found Mrs. Vandeleur inspecting the choicest curiosity of the bank--a centenarian clerk, who had been employed there for over eighty-five years, and who invariably alluded to his septuagenarian employer as "Master Alec."

"I've been here, man and boy, for nigh on eighty-six years," he was piping, as Wallace and the young ladies entered, "and disgrace has only once come upon the bank since I entered it! That was Master Wallace, to be sure. Oh, he's quiet enough now--butter wouldn't melt in his mouth! But he's a rank bad 'un--a rank bad 'un; and so I've always told Master Alec! Never trust him is what I've always said. Wine or whiskey, women or money, he can't resist any of 'em, for all he looks so quiet. He's a bad man, sir--a bad man is Wallace Armstrong!"

Laline heard every word, and turned to look at Wallace. He flushed and lowered his eyes under her inquiring gaze. Presently, drawing her apart, he confided to her in a whisper that old Farquharson was "quite off his head, and hadn't a notion what he was talking about."

A little later the ladies left, after being pressed by old Mr. Wallace to fix an early date for another visit, and drove home through the snow-covered streets in the early gloom of a winter's evening.

Clare was unusually quiet on the return journey; and it was only after the girls had retired to their rooms that night that she crept into Laline's room, looking very ghostly in her loose white flannel dressing-gown, with her long reddish-gold hair falling about her shoulders.

"Aren't you longing to know about my ghost-fright this evening?" she asked. "Of course I didn't tell Mr. Armstrong the truth. The fact is he's got some one in that other room he's keeping quiet--some one who rushed out at me in the dark with a sort of curse, and threw me out of the room. It was a woman, of course, and I suppose she was jealous, and that would account for her savagery."

"Clare," exclaimed Laline, "are you inventing this? How can I tell that you are speaking the truth now?"

For answer Clare slipped off her dressing-grown, and, pushing up the sleeve of her night-dress, displayed four black bruises, as of finger-marks, on the dazzling whiteness of her shoulder.

Laline uttered an exclamation of dismay.

"Clare, why didn't you tell Mr. Armstrong?"

"I don't think he would much have relished that!" Clare answered, with a disagreeable smile. "I am afraid, Laline, that he is a dreadfully bad lot--too bad even for me! There were lots of little things I noticed. For one, that the keys of the wine and of the spirits also were kept in old Mr. Wallace's possession. He doesn't even trust his nephew with a bottle of wine; for, when the sideboard was opened in the sitting-room, where we had tea, I particularly noticed that there were no bottles there. That might not mean anything if I hadn't heard that Mr. Armstrong drinks terribly at times. I think that must be the reason for that sort of sad saturnine look he gets in his eyes sometimes. I've noticed it before in people who drink. And then you know what old Farquharson said about him, and he ought to know."

"He's so old that I think he's lost his wits," said Laline. "Anyhow, it's rather hard to suppose a man is a drunkard simply because there are no bottles about his rooms."

"Why, I thought you didn't like Mr. Armstrong," Clare exclaimed, innocently, "and here you are defending him! This is a change indeed! Was he so very agreeable to-day as to destroy your old prejudice, or did the sight of the house and the banking business soften your hard heart towards him?"

There was no mistaking the unkindness of the sneer in this instance. Clare was indeed so profoundly jealous at the kind of understanding which she thought she had detected between Laline and Wallace during the latter part of the afternoon that her ordinary sweetness of manner was for the time forgotten. But Laline was in no mood for quarrelling. She wanted to be left alone with her thoughts and plans; so she contented herself with observing that Mr. Armstrong certainly improved on acquaintance, but that he appeared to have acquired, rightly or wrongly, a bad reputation. Then she yawned, and asked Clare to put out the candle before she left the room, upon which hint to retire Miss Cavan in considerable indignation acted.

All through Thursday and Friday and the morning of Saturday, Laline was going over in her mind the conversation she meant to have with Wallace Armstrong when she joined him at the gate of the Gardens that afternoon.

Concerning the lumber-room incident, she hardly felt justified in questioning him, so little reliance did she place upon Clare's statements. There was no doubt that Miss Cavan had been violently ejected from a room which Wallace had declared to be empty; but even now Laline's keen susceptibilities taught her that Clare was concealing something. As to the rumour concerning Wallace's occasional excesses, that was to Laline a far more serious matter. Long ago Captain Garth had styled him a drunkard, and Laline well remembered the copious and constant draughts of cognac in which her husband had indulged at Boulogne. But of these excesses there seemed no trace in Wallace's present manner. Save for the sudden infatuation he had conceived for her, and for an occasionally dreamy and fanciful habit of speech, there was nothing about him to suggest that he was not the sanest and most well-conducted of athletic and art-loving young English gentlemen.

The more she thought about Wallace the less she understood him; and what puzzled her most of all was that, while he admitted the fact of a responsibility he had incurred more than four years ago, he should still continue to pay her his addresses, without apparently ever troubling his head with the consideration that he was a married man.

Saturday dawned in clear cold sunshine, an ideal winter's day. Most fortunately for Laline, Clare was engaged to lunch at a friend's house, and afterwards to accompany a skating-party on the Long Water. Mrs. Vandeleur was absent-minded and absorbed in taking notes to be used at an interview with a very celebrated American spiritualist who was to visit her that afternoon, and by two o'clock there was nothing in the world to prevent Laline from walking out of the house to fulfil her appointment.

For the first time in her life she felt inclined to linger before her looking-glass, arranging and rearranging the set of her new hat, wondering whether she would look prettier with a regular curled fringe instead of the natural waves of hair which shaded her brow, taking her veil on and off because she was not quite sure that it suited her, desperately anxious to look her best, and wholly dissatisfied with her appearance, in spite of the fact that she had never in her life looked half so handsome as she did now, with a bright light of excitement in her hazel eyes and the pink colour coming and going in her cheeks.

So beautiful indeed did she appear to the love-stricken Wallace, waiting for her by the gate, as arranged, that the sight of her almost took his breath away.

"By Jove, you are lovely!" he exclaimed, half under his breath, like a school-boy.

"That sounds genuine, at any rate!" she said, laughing. "But, please, Mr. Armstrong, don't stand staring at me like that. Since you began by being personal, I will follow suit and say what a lovely fur-lined coat you have! It is so gorgeous that you look quite like a duke!"

"Or an actor," he suggested, laughing. "Actors are very partial to fur-lined coats, and being clean shaved makes me look still more like one."

"You used to wear a moustache?" she said, more as a statement than a question.

"Yes; but it was such a bad one that I abolished it. The reason for this coat is that I thought it might be cold driving."

"Driving?" she repeated, in surprise.

"Yes. Don't you see my cart waiting? I've brought a warm fur rug for you; but I'm afraid you'll be cold about the shoulders. It's only a few minutes past two, however, and we shall be able to buy a cape or a boa or something in one of the shops in the High Street."

Stepping up to the groom, who was driving a handsome bay mare in the neatest of dog-carts, Wallace directed him to follow while he turned back with Laline in the direction of the shops.

"You must choose it yourself," he explained to Laline. "Something very warm in fur."

"What are you thinking of?" she exclaimed. "You cannot for one moment suppose that I would accept valuable presents from a stranger?"

She had stopped in her walk, and he stopped, too, and looked down for a moment into her face, his blue eyes shining with a soft light, the sight of which brought sudden blushes to her cheek.

"I had forgotten," he said. "There is something else we must buy first."

In an instant she knew what he meant. Had she not been through the same experience with him before, years ago? She could almost have laughed aloud as he hurried her into a jeweller's shop, and they stood together before the counter while Wallace asked again, as he had done in Boulogne, to be shown some engagement-rings, "to fit this lady's finger."

The man's half-smile was just the same as it had been years ago. Surely some faint recollection of that former scene would come back to Wallace now, as he stood by her side and gently drew off her glove, just as he had done before, to try the rings!

"Which one do you like best?" he asked; and, breaking into a hysterical laugh, Laline declared that she must have "a turquoise heart surrounded by small diamonds."

"The price will be one hundred francs," she said, and almost expected that Wallace would at once proceed to purchase, as before, the wedding-ring as well.

But he did not do so. He only looked rather surprised, and inquired of the jeweller whether he had a ring of the description given. The man answered in the negative; and Laline, blushing and confused, allowed a moonstone-and-diamond heart and lovers'-knot to be slipped on her finger, and declared herself to be perfectly satisfied with it. The price this time was twenty guineas instead of one hundred francs; and, being now for the second time formally engaged to her husband, as she expressed it in her thoughts, Mrs. Wallace Armstrong left the shop with him.

She was still so overwhelmed by the way in which her little outburst had fallen flat that she behaved with great docility, and hardly uttered a protest as Wallace took her into a fashionable millinery establishment and purchased for her a deep sable collar, which he at once proceeded to fasten round her neck over her velvet cape.

"Now you will be safe from cold," he said, triumphantly. "As soon as my dear old uncle heard that to-day I was coming courting, he simply lined my pockets with bank-notes."

"Did you tell him?"

"Of course I did! And he was in a state of the highest delight. 'Not the red-haired one, I hope--I didn't like her mouth,' was his only objection. When he heard that it was you I was in love with, it was all I could do to prevent him from coming with me to plead my cause."

"You seem to have been very confident," observes Laline, "and very sure of winning my consent."

"I knew I should get it sooner or later by dint of asking," he answered, as he helped her into the dog-cart and carefully wrapped a fur rug round her knees. "Ever since I saw the lamplight shine on your face that first evening at Mrs. Vandeleur's I knew that I should never have a moment's peace until I had made you my wife."

"You have never even asked me to marry you!" said Laline, her spirits rising under the strangeness of her surroundings. "You have only met me four times, and have talked a lot of sentiment and abstract love-making; then to-day, before I had time to think, you dragged me into a jeweller's shop and bought me a ring. But you have never proposed to me, and I have never accepted you. Consequently we cannot be engaged."

"Lina Grahame," he said bending his head to look in her face as he took his seat by her side, "will you be my wife?"

"Wallace Armstrong," she returned, in quick staccato utterance, "what has become of Laline Garth?"