Chapter XVII

Skating in the Homestead grounds was skating at its best.

A considerable expanse of water, forming a miniature lake, led out into a long winding canal, which took its course under tall over-arching trees and between steep banks, in summer decked with flowering reeds, forget-me-nots, and ferns.

Laline had not skated since she lived in the country with her mother as a little child; but Wallace Armstrong excelled in skating, as he did in all outdoor exercises, and once he had fitted to her feet one of several pairs of skates he had provided, and had affixed his own as well, the two started, he grasping both her hands in support and teaching her to bend and sway her supple figure as they moved over the ice together.

The keen air blew in their faces, the whirr of their skates and here and there the snapping of a twig under the weight of snow were the only sounds that came to them; across the western sky red bands of light showed where the sun was sinking to rest; while over a long stretch of sparkling white snow they could see through the bare tree-branches the comfortable lights shine out of the windows of the house to beckon them to warmth and shelter.

But Laline and Wallace were on enchanted ground; they seemed no longer two persons, but moved by one and the same spirit as they sped hand in hand over the frozen lake. Faster and faster they flew, until they seemed to leave the beaten wind behind them and to glow with a warmth that was kindlier than sunshine. It was as though they could not tire; the magnetic effect of shoulder touching shoulder, hand clasped in hand, spurred them ever to fresh efforts. Not until six o'clock did Laline remember that she was tired. Then suddenly her ankle gave way; she slipped, and would have fallen had not Wallace caught her in his arms.

"I am tired," she said, clasping both hands round his arm as she smiled up in his face. "I never thought of it until this minute, because it was so perfectly beautiful. But I am really very tired."

He reproached himself strenuously for having allowed her to do too much, and, tenderly assisting her to a seat, removed her skates and led her to the house. In the drawing-room a lamp was burning under a shade of crimson silk, throwing a ruddy glow over the room, and the leaping firelight shone on the tea-things spread on a small table near its cheerful blaze.

"You must want dinner now, my poor, dear child!" exclaimed Wallace, ruefully. "We ought to have had tea an hour and a half ago, only we forgot all about it."

"Tea is just exactly what I want," she declared--"tea by the fire! And then I must be rushing back as fast as I can go. What will Mrs. Vandeleur say?"

"I will see her to-night, if you like."

"Not for the world!"

Into Laline's face a troubled look crept. There was still so much to be told. Mrs. Vandeleur had yet to learn that Wallace was her husband; and Wallace had yet to be told that he was at length in love with his own wife. She was so happy at this moment that instinct warned her against the risk of explanations. Wallace saw the cloud on her face, and was by her side in a moment.

"What is the matter, my darling?"

"Nothing," she said, turning to him suddenly with tears glistening in her eyes--"except the fear that some day you may learn things, hear things, which will make you love me less."

"There is no possibility with me of loving you less, dear," he said, "for I love you absolutely. Until I met you I merely drifted through life; art, business, society, athletics, each took a certain portion of my time, but I wanted an anchorage. I was frittering my time away waiting for you. Do you know what that wonderful little old lady of yours told me when she first saw me? She said--I remember her actual words--'You are capable of going to the greatest lengths of what people would call folly for the sake of one you love. You like many people, you love very few. But where you love it is a passion, a religion!'"

"Did she tell you anything else?" asked Laline, deeply interested.

"Yes. She predicted that I was on the eve of a new experience which would alter the whole course of my life. Why, Lina, that was loving you!"

"Yes; but did she make no prediction? I know one ought not to be so superstitious as to believe those things, but she makes such strangely true guesses sometimes. Did she say your love would make you happy?"

He hesitated.

"Of course Mrs. Vandeleur doesn't know everything," he said at last, half laughing. "She is merely a remarkably close observer, and a good judge of character from the face and hand."

"But what did she say?" persisted Laline.

"She said," he answered, throwing his arm about her waist and drawing her closely to him, as though defying Fate to separate them, "that my love-affair would bring me a great deal of trouble, and that there would be sorrow and partings and evil wrought me by an enemy, until death should set me free."

Almost unconsciously, as he quoted the little sibyl's words, his tone changed from banter to deep seriousness; and to Laline there was something ominous and terrifying in Mrs. Vandeleur's prophecy.

"I can't bear to hear you repeat her words," she whispered, clinging to him as she spoke, "for to me also she prophesied that trouble--terrible trouble--would come into my life if once I let love enter my heart."

"And yet what trouble can come between you and me?" he asked, smoothing her brow with his hand as she rested her head against his shoulder. "Who can part us? No one, so far as I know, has either the power or the will to do so. My uncle is almost as anxious for my marriage as I am--and, if I had my way, it should take place to-morrow. Mrs. Vandeleur will offer no objection, I imagine, and, even if she did, she has no authority over you. Your health is good----"

"I never remember a day's real illness in my life."

"Nor do I. And here is your house ready for you. As to money to buy frocks and things--you have only to mention a sum and my uncle will send it to you by return of post. Nothing can part us now!"

"Don't, don't!" she exclaimed, laying her fingers on his lips--"it sounds like a challenge to Fate!"

He laughed as he kissed her finger-tips.

"That ghost-ridden panelled room of Mrs. Vandeleur's has held you too long," he said. "You are growing as superstitious as an old villager. And, my darling, there are actually tears rolling down your cheeks! Now let me dry them, and then you must bathe your eyes and take off your hat and cloak, and we will sit down facing each other at the tea-table and play at being a newly-married clerk on a hundred a year bringing home his bride!"

Half laughing, but with moist eyes, she obeyed him, and in a very few minutes they were sitting down to an old-fashioned country tea of hot cakes, hot buttered toast, and eggs served in various ways. To each it seemed the most absolutely satisfactory meal ever placed before them; but then they were very much in love, and they were together.

The one predominating idea in Wallace's mind was the wedding-day; and upon whatever subject Laline began to talk he invariably brought it round to the date he wanted her to fix.

"You have just said you are so fond of sunshine and that you don't like cold and fogs," he said. "Well, then, why put up with any more of them? We will be married at once, and set sail for Algiers or Cairo or the Canary Islands, or just where you please where there is sunshine and warmth and a blue sky above us. Why should you be shivering in St. Mary's Crescent, and I be freezing at a desk in the Strand, when we might be enjoying ourselves on sunny seas together? Are you fond of the sea?"

"Very, very fond. I was never so happy when I lived in Boulogne as when I could wander alone for miles along the sands, watching the waves. And I am a capital sailor too."

"So you have lived at Boulogne?" he remarked, in some surprise. "I had a short and very unpleasant experience of the place rather more than four years ago--a time I much dislike recalling. But, if you love the sea, we have endless delight to look forward to, for I am never happier than when on board ship. So that brings me back to the day, Lina dear; and if you really loved me you wouldn't put me off and keep me waiting."

"I have never bought a _trousseau_!" she demurred. "You must let me consult Mrs. Vandeleur as to just what time I shall want to get my things together."

"I think it is the most preposterous convention in the world," he protested, energetically, "that two people who love each other should be kept apart over a silly matter of millinery! As though I should value you more highly with a dozen hats than with one, or think you more beautiful in any gown than you look at this minute! In Shakspere's time girls knew what love meant. Juliet didn't worry Romeo to wait while she ordered and tried on frills and furbelows, but went straight to the point--

'If that thy bent of love be honourable, Thy purpose marriage, send me word to-morrow, By one that I'll procure to come to thee, Where, and what time, thou wilt perform the rite; And all my fortunes at thy feet I'll lay, And follow thee, my lord, throughout the world!'"

"Juliet was only fourteen, and didn't know the value of dress," Laline retorted, laughing.

"If we have a special license," he remarked, ignoring her protest, "we need not have that tiresome fortnight of delay."

"When I do marry you," she said, quickly, "it must be in a church. Marriage in a registry office means nothing to me and seems only an impious mockery."

"Of course we'll be married in a church!" he returned, in some surprise. "St. Mary-le-Strand or Kensington Church, whichever you prefer. And, now that we have come to the place, dear, it is as well to fix the day."

It was only after long persuasion that Laline at last agreed that the ceremony should take place in February, a month that had just begun. It seemed as though she were afraid of hurrying on the wedding lest those misfortunes at which Mrs. Vandeleur had hinted should follow close upon her decision. She was intensely anxious, for the same reason, to defer, for the next few days, at least, any public announcement of her forthcoming marriage.

"Everybody will say I am marrying you for your money," she explained, "and I sha'n't like to hear it."

"What in the world does it matter to us what they may say?" he inquired. "They will scarcely tell you so to your face; and, if such things are going to be said, they will be uttered just the same if we marry next week or next year. If you loved me a hundredth part as much as I love you, you wouldn't want to defer our marriage by an hour."

"We are so perfectly happy as we are!" she was pleading, when he interrupted her.

"Perfectly happy! When I have to leave you and exist through hours before I see you again I am not happy. Of course I will call to-morrow at St. Mary's Crescent----"

"Not to-morrow. Monday."

"Lina, you are proving every moment more clearly how little you care!"

"Lorin, dear, I do care! But I must have breathing time."

This conversation took place in the brougham, in which Laline was being driven back to Kensington, as Wallace feared lest she might catch cold in the dog-cart. In the brougham, too, he could sit beside her with his arms wrapped round her, which was an ideal method of travelling and to the taste of both. To Wallace it seemed as though immense capabilities for passion and tenderness, which for years had been closed up within his heart, overflowed now for the first time. He could not lavish enough caresses upon her, could not call her by enough tender names; and the contrast between his present extreme demonstrativeness and the easy courteous self-possession of his habitual manner might well have startled Laline, but that the change in her own bearing was, if possible, even more marked.

Very early deprived of a mother's love, and placed in a position entailing a measure of responsibility, Laline had received little or no marks of affection from man or woman since her early childhood. "_La p'tite Gart_" had cooked her father's dinners, run on her father's errands, and taken care of the neighbours' children; and, later, Miss Lina Grahame, assistant mistress at Mrs. Melville's select Academy for Young Ladies, had been looked up to as a paragon of austere propriety, engaged from seven in the morning until nine at night in instilling English, French, needlework, and manners to her employer's pupils.

In all this life of routine there had been no love at all. For seven years the girl's whole nature, originally confiding and affectionate, had been repressed and thrown back on itself. Knowing that she was really married, she had set herself the task of crushing out of her heart every trace of tender feeling for any person of the opposite sex. She had not dared to love, and had planned for herself a future of incessant work and activity, into which no thoughts of love might ever enter. The shock of overhearing her father and husband haggling over the money bargain by which she was transferred from the one to the other had been great and even terrible; but fortunately Laline's nature was too sweet to be permanently embittered against all men by those unhappy early experiences. Still the result of these latter had been to make her both self-reliant and reserved, and to induce her to regard herself as a person set apart, for whom the happiness of loving and being loved could never exist, doomed by man's selfishness to a life of loveless solitude.

Matters being thus with her, the affection with which, almost from the moment of his entrance into Mrs. Vandeleur's house, Wallace had inspired her, came like the warmest sunshine into Laline's heart, melting the icy reserve in which it perforce was wrapped. She had never really tried to resist the feelings of interest and tenderness with which he had inspired her. He was her husband--it was right that she should love him; and neither her remembrance of his selfish treachery towards her years ago, nor the vague rumours of drunkenness and dissipation which she had heard against him recently, sufficed to diminish her growing regard. Duty and inclination went hand in hand, and she knew now that she had loved him as they wandered together under the snow-covered trees in Kensington Gardens, had loved him as they stood together in the South Sea room at his uncle's house, and that she loved him now, passionately and without reserve, receiving and returning his kisses with a warmth and tenderness which satisfied even a lover's exacting spirit, and nestling against him with a gentle confidence which touched and delighted him beyond the power of words to express.

It was nearly ten o'clock when the carriage arrived in the old-fashioned red-brick Crescent and clattered over the stone-paved court until it drew up before Mrs. Vandeleur's door. A light burned in the front room on the ground-floor, and Clare Cavan's face was clearly to be seen, pressed against the window and peeping out at them.

"Don't kiss me, Lorin--some one is watching!" whispered Laline; but her warning was thrown away.

"I am proud of my right to kiss you, darling, and I don't care who sees me!" he whispered back, as, raising his hat, he pressed his lips to hers.

The next moment the door was opened by Susan, and Laline ran into the house.

In the front room Clare bit her thin red lips until the blood started; she was too genuinely angry even to go after Laline.

"Cat!" she whispered to herself. "Sly cat, with her Puritan airs! But I'll make her suffer for cutting me out and making me look ridiculous! And Aunt Cecilia, too, laughing at me absolutely, and telling me I'd better leave off trying to attract with Lina about! I can at least make her thoroughly miserable and uncomfortable to-morrow morning. But as soon as he comes he will set it right. Never mind; he shall have a bad time of it to-morrow, too, and shall be made to feel disgraced and ashamed before Lina and Aunt Cecilia and me if I can manage it. It's most unlucky that to-morrow's Sunday!"

A sudden inspiration came at that moment to Miss Cavan; her odd green eyes gleamed with satisfaction as she quickly seated herself before a desk and proceeded to write, in a round disguised hand, a letter addressed to "Wallace Armstrong, Esq.," and signed "A Well-Wisher."

She laughed as she read it; and, still laughing, ran lightly to her room, put on her hat and cloak, slipped the letter into her pocket, and, venturing boldly out into the snowy night, chartered a hansom and directed the man to drive to a certain address, in order that with her own hands she might place her precious missive in the letter-box.