Chapter XXI

There is a cynical French proverb which states that the worse the man, the better he understands women.

In the case of the two Armstrongs the saying was so far true that Wallace Armstrong the elder, after only half-an-hour's intercourse, gauged to a nicety the mental and moral attributes of Clare Cavan, of which his cousin had but an elementary notion. He admired her beauty, and looked with amusement on her untruthfulness, her slyness, and her envious disposition. Vanity and sensuality were two qualities he always expected to find in women, and he at once recognised them as leading characteristics of Clare's nature. She belonged to a type he thoroughly understood; and he knew perfectly well that in her secret heart she would not in the least resent the insolently-worded admiration or the careless caresses of a man as handsome as himself, even though she believed herself to be in love with his cousin. Like many another man who professes to understand women, however, Wallace Armstrong had gained his experience among the least worthy members of a sex which he in consequence thought himself justified in scorning. Love of money and love of themselves were, in his opinion, the two ruling motives in every woman's life; and by appealing strongly enough to either of these, any man could make a conquest of any woman--a conquest which, when made, would be, in Wallace's opinion, not worth having. These ideas, which he freely professed, only made him the more popular with such women as came in his way, and he was able from experience to calculate exactly the effect of his unconventional behaviour upon Clare Cavan.

That young lady was not accustomed to being found out. Her drawing-room triumphs had not prepared her for this rough-and-ready style of address; but she relished it none the less, belonging as she did to the type of woman who secretly worships a bully. Her intense vanity led her to believe that the elder Armstrong had fallen in love with her at first sight; and she would have been deeply mortified had she known that his sole reason for ingratiating himself with her, and presently with Mrs. Vandeleur, was that he might have opportunities of meeting the girl who had been introduced to him as Lina Grahame. Clare Cavan's kiss he instantly forgot; but Lina Grahame's look of scorn and hatred seemed to burn into his soul.

How dared she--a penniless companion, a prudish, calculating, fortune-hunter, intent on securing a wealthy husband--how dared she gaze at him as though he were a thing accursed? Not for a moment could he forget her dark eyes, distended with horror, as they fixed themselves upon him, or the disdainful curve of her sweet red month, or the tone in which she said she loved Lorin for being an honourable gentleman, but pitied him since she had met his cousin.

For years he had not wished for anything so ardently as he now longed to humble this girl's pride and give her back scorn for scorn. Her face lingered persistently in his mind; he had but to close his eyes to recall every feature with absolute distinctness, even the two perpendicular lines between her eyebrows when she frowned, and the quick trick of her fingers pushing her hair from her brow, seeming strangely familiar to him. It was presumably the sympathy of hate, he told himself, which made her image so clear and dominant in his mind. Yet he lingered at Mrs. Vandeleur's, in the hope that Lina Grahame might again appear, for fully an hour after the elder lady's return.

His handsome appearance and surly manners interested Mrs. Vandeleur, who promptly prophesied all manner of evil things for him from a cursory study of his hand and face.

"You have quite a remarkably wicked hand!" she exclaimed, bending over it with a touch of genuine excitement. "Decidedly you were born under an evil star, for you bring misfortunes to yourself and to other people alike; and what is more curious, you appear to deserve them. I am really afraid of telling you more, lest I should hurt your feelings."

"Not a bit. I am accustomed to strong language on the subject of my character, from my relations and from police-court officials alike."

"You have no moral principles whatever," continued the little lady, turning over his large, well-shaped, but, truth to tell, not over-clean hand with her delicate be-ringed fingers. "You are wholly unreliable and most ungrateful; your passions are violent, and you make no attempt to control them. You are selfish to the core----"

"Pray stop the catalogue of my deficiencies, Mrs. Vandeleur, or your niece here will fall madly in love with me!"

"Your past has been troubled and stormy, and your future looks very black," continued the little lady, quite unmoved by his sarcasm. "Only one thing can save you--the love of a good, pure woman."

She uttered the words with her usual slow impressiveness, letting his hand fall as she finished speaking; and, although he affected to treat the matter lightly, her words rang through Wallace's brain when he left her house a little later in the evening.

It was a miserably dull and gloomy evening, bitterly cold and shrouded in fog. There was some excuse for spirit-drinking under the circumstances; but Wallace did not require an excuse for the constant whiskies-and-sodas and "nips" of raw brandy in which he indulged at all hours of the day and night when free from his cousin's watchful care. Since his imprisonment he had been lodging in a street off the Strand; and, although he was forbidden to enter Alexander Wallace's house, his cousin encouraged his visits there in the hope of keeping him out of mischief. It was easy enough for him to summon Adams by knocking in a peculiar manner agreed upon between them, and then to slip up-stairs to Lorin's rooms, where he was sure of warmth and comfort and a hearty welcome. Old Alexander was aware that his orders regarding his elder nephew were set at naught, and he was well pleased that it should be so. Wallace had angered and shamed him so deeply that his name was a forbidden subject in the household, and the old gentleman affected to believe that he had only one nephew. That his sister's child, whom he had brought up from a boy and loved as his own son, should be convicted of drunkenness and brutal violence and sent to prison with hard labour, had been a terrible blow to the old man, from whom Lorin had often contrived to keep his cousin's delinquencies a secret. The disgrace of the whole affair went nigh to break Alexander's heart, and none the less so because he had always most unreasonably loved his elder nephew the better of the two.

Lorin was now seven-and-twenty; and since his parents' death, eighteen years before, he had been adopted by his uncle, to whom he had been in every way a credit. Beyond a few school scrapes, the result of boyish high spirits, and a little unnecessary expenditure at college, there had been no fault to find with him. He had been a good, even a brilliant scholar, and had won the liking and esteem of all who had to do with him as a growing lad; and when arrived at man's estate the same tale was true. Although disinclined for office work, he had set himself to master the entire business at the bank, with the result that his opinion was already of value in the house, while outside among general society he was extremely popular and everywhere in great request.

With his cousin it was far otherwise. As a mere baby he had been placed in Alexander Wallace's care by the latter's elder sister, a woman of passionate and ungovernable temper, very unhappily married to a man from whom she was speedily separated. The heart of the old bachelor-uncle went out to the handsome black-haired baby boy at first sight, and no subsequent delinquencies on Wallace's part could wholly alienate from him his uncle's love. By turns he was expelled from school, "plucked" for examinations, rusticated from college, and gradually shunned by the more respectable and law-abiding of his acquaintances. A fierce, sardonic temper and instinctive rebellion against all constituted authority characterised him from early boyhood, and his uncle's indulgence, while it bred in him no reciprocal affection, developed to the full the boy's intensely selfish nature and extravagant disposition. As a lad he possessed considerable charm of manner, despite his intractable disposition; and from the time when, at the respective ages of nine and twelve, the two cousins first met, Lorin had loved and shielded him, often taking upon himself the blame for Wallace's misdemeanours, and showing towards his elder an affectionate forbearance which the latter was wholly incapable of appreciating.

At twenty-one, Wallace Armstrong forged his uncle's name on several separate occasions, chiefly in order to settle his heavy gambling debts, some of which he had contracted at the club kept at one time by Captain Garth, Laline's father.

Then followed years of banishment, spent for the most part in gambling-dens, hotel-bars, and billiard-rooms, among the male and female "riff-raff" of the Colonies, leading up to the moment of Wallace's return to Europe, and his memorable meeting with Captain Garth in the market-place of Boulogne.

From the time of his return to his uncle's house, under his cousin Lorin's care, in deep mourning for the youthful bride of whom typhoid fever had, so he said, deprived him, Wallace Armstrong's conduct had grown daily worse. At the beginning he did indeed make some pretence of earning his living as a clerk in his uncle's employment; but his unpunctuality, his carelessness, and his habit of appropriating as his own any loose change that might pass through his hands, speedily proved his unsuitability for such a position. Both Lorin and his uncle set to work to find some outdoor occupation which such a ne'er-do-well might find within his powers; but Wallace's total unreliability, his insolence and laziness, together with his intemperate habits, rendered him undesirable in any wage-earning capacity whatever. He did not like work and had no intention of working, and he detested regular hours and the conventions of peaceable citizenship. But for Lorin's incessant care and kindness and the generosity with which he denied himself in order to provide his cousin with more than the mere necessities of life, Wallace would have gone under long before. Yet he was in no way grateful to Lorin, but cherished against him a bitter snarling envy which he did not scruple to express in words.

"I know you enjoy unselfishness and that sort of thing," he would say, while pocketing his cousin's money, "so I won't deprive you of the chance of feeling virtuous. This doling out pocket-money to me, and filling up my whiskies with your infernal soda-water, and bailing me out when I am run in, all places you in a beautiful light of self-sacrifice and stained-glass-window sort of nobility and charity. The prodigal son's brother made a great mistake in openly grudging the outlay on the other fellow; it would have paid him better in the long run to have pretended a great concern for his welfare, as you do for mine."

On this particular evening, when Wallace found himself in the Crescent outside Mrs. Vandeleur's house, he did not feel in the mood for his favourite amusement of sneering at his cousin. Certain things he had seen and heard during the course of his visit had made an unusually strong impression upon his ordinarily callous and drink-sodden brain.

"I love your cousin because he is a frank and loyal and honourable gentleman--honest in his dealings with men, and gentle and chivalrous to all women."

He could hear the words now ringing through his head in those sweet deep tones of a voice which was oddly familiar to him.

Had this Lina Graham known him intimately instead of being a complete stranger to him, she could scarcely have chosen words more calculated to wound him by emphasising the differences between him and his cousin.

Frank and loyal, honourable and honest, gentle and chivalrous!

Not one of those qualities was to be found in Wallace, and he knew it. Even his apparent brusque truthfulness was assumed, and he could, if the occasion served, lie with apparent directness and simplicity. Women in general, or, at least, such women as he met, liked a man the better for his bad reputation; but this little prude in white was clearly not of these. He hated to recall the scorn of her gaze; it pricked and stung him even while he endeavoured to drown all clear remembrance in copious draughts of fiery fluid. To-night, as he wandered from one to another of his usual haunts, the miserable futility of the life he led came before him for the first time. In the clear eyes of a girl he saw himself mirrored and shrank in horror and disgust at the reflection.

In his thirty-first year, what was he but a homeless waif, a gaol-bird and a drunkard, subsisting upon charity, and biting the hand that fed him? Wallace buried his head in his hands and groaned aloud at the thought. Among the common and degraded persons by whom he was surrounded not one dared to ask what ailed him, for his surly and insolent temper was well known. Looking up and around him, he felt that he hated his companions, and that the coarse joviality which he had hitherto commended as unconventional was mere forced drunken buffoonery. Lina Grahame would know her contempt to be justified could she see him among such surroundings. With a muttered oath, and leaving his glass unemptied, he strode out again into the night. The fog got into his throat and choked him, the streets were deserted, but for a passing policeman on his beat and a few pedestrians loudly complaining of the bitter frost and hurrying home.

Home! Wallace had no home. His landlady had already more than once given him notice to quit; there would certainly be neither fire nor welcome awaiting him there. As to his uncle's house, he could indeed slip in there on the sly; but he had given his word to his cousin not to present himself there when he had been drinking too freely, and of a certainty he had been drinking too freely to-night.

What right had Lorin to extract such a promise--Lorin, to whom drink offered no temptation? What right had such a man to make rules of conduct for others? Doubtless he was sitting comfortably by the fire in his well-furnished rooms, thinking of Lina Grahame, and writing letters to her, or reading hers to him, or perhaps sketching her portrait. Warmth and comfort, the glow of the fire, and sweet thoughts of his love for him; the cold and dirty streets, the fog and frost, the flaring lights of a gin palace, and the thought of a woman's scorn, for his cousin. Very soon Lorin would marry, and then his, Wallace's, surreptitious visits to his uncle's house would be forbidden altogether. He could hear the voice in which she would speak the order concerning them.

"Lorin dear, you must really keep your cousin away. His very appearance is a disgrace to you. He is not fit to enter a gentleman's house."

In some such words she would speak, in that voice which to Wallace was like an echo from the past. And to-morrow she would tell Lorin about his disreputable cousin's visit, while she twined her arms about his neck and clung to him as she had clung to Wallace that evening when she had mistaken his identity.

He could feel the clasp of her fingers upon his shoulders now, and the silky softness of her hair as he stroked it, and the quiver that ran through her frame as he clasped her supple waist. She loved Lorin--there was little doubt of that. Passionate love thrilled through her touch, thrilled in her voice when she murmured--

"You have come at last!"

No good woman had ever loved him--no good woman had ever clung to him and welcomed his coming with such whole-hearted delight. What had that little witch woman prophesied about him?

"Your past has been stormy. Your future looks black. Only one thing can save you--the love of a pure, good woman."

The fact that he was really married seldom if ever troubled him. If it came into his mind at all, the remembrance provoked only curses on the head of his missing wife. Had she only proved reasonable, he might now have been installed with her in that very house at Hampstead which would soon be prepared for the reception of Lorin and his bride. Wallace cursed them both as he thought of them and of the happiness that awaited them. Fate had been against him, luck had been against him. His evil instincts, his ungovernable temper, his hatred of authority and love of violent pleasures, had been born with him and had led him on to the ship-wreck of his life.

Only the love of a good woman could save him, Mrs. Vandeleur had said. But good women looked at him with the eyes of Lina Grahame.

"Curse her!" he muttered, as he tossed down the raw spirit in his glass. "I wish, with all my soul, that I could do her an injury!"