Chapter XXVI

Alexander Wallace was, it is to be feared, incapable of keeping a secret.

Had he not been a singularly lucky man with an excellent head for figures, he would never have augmented the splendid business which came to him from his father, for he was almost incapable of deception and by nature as trustful as he was truthful.

His nephews were both men of wider education and more subtle brains than he possessed, and both could read him like a book. As a result of this, Lorin anticipated his wishes and studied his comfort in every detail, while Wallace took advantage of the old man's weak points and sneered at his guilelessness.

It followed therefore that, as soon as Lorin entered his uncle's presence at about five o'clock that day, and found him greatly agitated and Laline already departed, he became convinced that some talk had passed between them intimately connected with his own future happiness, and set himself to work to find out of what it was composed.

"Have you and Lina settled the wedding-day between you, Uncle Alec?" he inquired, taking his stand by the fireplace, so that the lamplight fell full on his companion's face.

Alexander Wallace's features twitched as at some painful remembrance, and there was an embarrassed pause before he replied--

"'There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and the lip,' my boy. I should not tease Lina about the date, if I were you. She has known you so short a time that it is not surprising she should want the wedding put off for a bit."

"Oh, but I shall never agree to that!" Lorin returned, in tones the coolness of which belied his keen anxiety. "The first thing to-morrow I shall buy the licence; and before the end of this month we shall be man and wife."

"Ay, if she will have you."

"What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing!" Alexander returned, confusedly, remembering his promise to reveal nothing until Lina was far away. "But girls change their minds, so people say."

His attempt at acting was a complete failure--a child would not have been deceived by it. Lorin, from his vantage-ground back to the light, stared relentlessly into the old man's face, which gave his words the lie, and a great fear began to creep into his heart.

"Did Lina tell you she does not love me?" he asked, after a pause.

"No, no, my boy--no word of such a thing!"

"Did she tell you she meant to break with me? Answer, for Heaven's sake, and tell me the truth! It is not like you, Uncle Alec, to hesitate and beat about the bush and say what you do not mean, and it is not fair to me. My life's happiness is at stake and I must know what she said to you."

"I cannot break my promise to her!" exclaimed Alexander, rising in deep distress. "Lorin, my boy, you should give up all thoughts of her--for the present, at least. I fear, my lad, it is not to be and that you must forget her."

"You might as well tell me to tear my heart out and not feel the pain! What reason did she give you? But she can't be in earnest; she only means to try me."

"She is absolutely in earnest, and she trusts to you to respect her wishes. Consider what a short time you have known her----"

His words fell upon heedless ears. Before he had finished speaking Lorin darted from the room. In a very few seconds he was down the stairs, out of the house, and in a hansom on his way to 21, St. Mary's Crescent.

Only one idea filled his brain--he must see Lina, must never leave her until she had sworn to be his as soon as the Church could marry them. To-morrow he would buy a special licence, and, that bought, she must instantly become his wife, so that no more deadly torturing fears of losing her could harass him.

Twice he shouted to the driver to go faster; and a block in the thoroughfare at the top of Sloane Street threw him into a fever of nervous impatience. The hideous supposition that she might be induced to jilt him for his cousin rose more than once in his mind, to be angrily dismissed again. She must be merely wishing to try him out of girlish coquetry, for which she should be punished by being married, _trousseau_ or no _trousseau_, within the next twenty-four hours. Of that he was fully determined.

"I am too jealous to be an engaged man," he told himself. "Lina must be mine altogether, and I must take her away with me. I know she loves me. What could possibly come between us? It must be some girlish freak on her part. But I am glad I have to see her, for I am starving for a kiss! I must see her alone, and will kiss away from her lips the memory of her coldness to-day. What a confoundedly slow cab this is! I could walk the distance in half the time!"

At St. Mary's Crescent bad news awaited him. Susan, who showed him into the morning-room on the ground-floor, and took his name up-stairs to Miss Grahame, returned to tell him that that young lady could not receive him. She was suffering from a bad headache, and had gone to bed.

"Gone to bed? It isn't six o'clock yet! Is she really ill, Susan?"

"Yes, sir."

Lorin looked doubtfully at Susan; then he drew a sovereign from his pocket and laid it in her hand. While she was feebly affecting to return it, he closed her hand upon it, and spoke in low quick tones in her ear.

"Susan, have you a sweetheart?"

"Dear--no, sir!"

"No one who loves you?"

"Well, sir, I won't quite say that----"

"Susan, remember what your sweetheart would feel if he were disappointed about seeing you, and tell me the truth. Has Miss Grahame really gone to bed?"

"Not quite, sir; but she is in her room, and looks dreadful bad. She's been crying, sir. She was crying while she spoke to me."

"You must take her a note."

"Will you write it in here, sir?" asked Susan, in sympathetic tones, putting pen, ink, and paper on the table before him, and discreetly retiring a few steps.

And Lorin wrote thus--

"MY OWN DARLING HEART--I must see you! I can't live another hour
unless you speak to me! I have something of the utmost importance to
both of us to propose. Lina, my only love, why were you so cold to me
to-day? Why won't you see me now? And why are you crying? See me just
for one brief instant, and let me kiss your tears away! Lina, I shall
go mad if you treat me coldly! You can't possibly understand what
you are to me or you would never play with me like this. Lina, you
have my very heart and soul in your keeping; I will not even believe
it possible that you could treat me badly until I hear it from your
lips! See me, my darling, for Heaven's sake, just for one moment! You
need not even speak. Come down and give me one kiss, my wife that is
to be, and I will go away happy. Only come!

"Yours, through life and death, "Lorin."

A silly, incoherent, lover's letter, but poor Laline's eyes overflowed at each line of it.

Susan waited discreetly outside the door while Miss Grahame read it, and heartily hoped the handsome, pleasant-spoken young gentleman with the beautiful blue eyes and lovely curly black hair would not be disappointed.

Presently Laline's voice came to her from within the bedroom.

"Go to Mr. Armstrong, Susan, and tell him I am very sorry but I am not well enough to see any one to-night."

A stifled sob came after the words, and Susan decided that Miss Grahame was "awful cruel," and did not deserve so fascinating a sweetheart.

"And him a young gentleman of fortune, and she only a sort of governess, too!"

This was Susan's private comment. Aloud she said timidly--

"Mr. Armstrong seems in a dreadful way about you, miss. Shall I tell him you are feeling a little better now?"

"Please tell Mr. Armstrong just what I have said and no more!"

"Fine airs she do give herself, to be sure--and her no better-looking than some other people!" Susan said to herself, as she flounced down-stairs. "It isn't everybody that admires them thin women! She isn't half as pretty as Miss Clare to my way of thinking! Miss Clare and me we have got a bit of flesh on our bones; and I've heard say that's what the men admire, and not your scrag-ends of girls!"

But aloud to Mr. Armstrong, eagerly waiting in the front room, Susan, with demure mien, merely repeated the message Miss Grahame had given her.

Lorin knitted his brows.

"She is really ill, then, Susan?"

"I think she is upset, sir, about something--more than ill, so to say."

"Ah! Is your mistress in?"

"Yes, sir. She is in her study."

"Alone?"

"Yes, sir."

"Will you take her a note, too, Susan, while I wait for an answer?"

"Certainly, sir!"

Susan was growing quite excited over this little romance. Lorin, on his part, understood something of Mrs. Vandeleur's nature, of her shrewdness, her inquisitiveness, and her love of what Americans call "bossing the show," and being appealed to as an arbiter of fate. There was therefore some subtlety in his note, which ran as follows--

"MY DEAR MRS. VANDELEUR--On my memorable first interview with you
not many weeks ago you told me various things about myself that were
true, and foretold others that have since come to pass. You were also
good enough to express yourself in kind and friendly terms towards
me, and to advise me to come to you should I need counsel. At this
present moment I am in deep distress and perplexity, and should be
most grateful for your advice and help. Will you give them? Hoping
fervently that your kindness may move you to do so, I remain,

"Yours very faithfully, "Wallace Lorin Armstrong."

He had not long to wait for an answer. In a very few seconds Susan tripped down with a gracious message, and showed the visitor into her mistress's study.

How well he remembered, as he entered, his first meeting with Laline, the slim white figure dimly visible in fog and firelight, and the look of fear and astonishment with which she had turned towards him as she dropped the crystal ball at his feet in her alarm at his unexpected entrance. It had all happened so few days ago, and yet it seemed to Lorin that he must always have known Laline, that she must always have been part of his very existence, and that his hopes and aims must ever have centred wholly in her. The room, with its odd accessories, gleaned from Eastern and mediæval art by modern superstition, recalled her image so vividly before his mind that his eyes turned involuntarily to the low seat by the fire, as if expecting that the form of Laline herself would resolve itself from the shadows and rise on his approach.

But the little gray lady with the jewelled fingers and the bird-bright eyes was alone, peering at him out of her long-handled eye-glass set with garnets and turquoise.

"So you have sought me?" she said, extending a small ivory-like hand towards him. "I thought you would! You were rather sceptical, too. But let that pass. Shall I tell you, or will you tell me, what you have come about?"

"As you like," he answered, sinking into the chair she indicated with a wave of her hand.

"You are passionately in love with my beautiful secretary. For that I owe you a very deep grudge. She was just the white-souled, child-hearted creature I wanted for my work, and you have spoiled her. When she came to me her mind was as a clear page; now it is disfigured by an ideal picture of you. Yes--disfigured, to my way of thinking, in spite of your good looks, Mr. Armstrong. If she had remained the passionless white-flower soul she was when she came to me, we might together have completed my two great works in a comparatively short space of time. But now this tiresome, transient love-rubbish has already rendered her self-conscious, capricious, and hysterical, and from the calm, soulful study of the occult, she has fallen to studying only you. What is the result? Lina can't write, she can't think, she has headaches, and cries when she is looked at. That is not the psychic state in which to approach loftier spheres of thought. That is the worst of our sex. Give them the hope of fortune, of distinction, of a career, a calm and elevated sphere of thought, which would raise them above the little aches and pains and vexations of humanity, and what do they do? At the distant vision of a man, it all goes to the winds! All my secretaries have been like that; and I might have guessed that Lina, who is very much the most beautiful, would not escape this craze for the male sex which is a drag upon the spiritual progress of almost every woman between seventeen and fifty. Why could you not have fallen in love with my niece Clare? That would in no way have interfered with my work or my plans. Clare is very handsome, I suppose, although it is not a type that I personally admire. Were I an elderly man, however, I could imagine myself raving about her. You were supposed to be Clare's admirer at first, and had you continued to be so I should have nothing to complain of. Between my niece and me there is nothing in common. She is too mundane, too full-blooded for me. She is like too much sunlight coming glaringly in one's eyes between Venetian blinds--the shock all the cruder because of the pretence of concealment and shade. But Lina--she is far too good to be wasted on a man! Love and marriage take all life and individuality out of ninety-nine of every hundred Englishwomen; and the better the woman, the more like a cow or a cabbage she becomes under domesticity. There--my sermon is ended! Now you can recount your little love-troubles; but don't suppose for a moment that you have happened upon a sympathetic listener!"

"I would rather be understood than sympathised with," he returned, gravely. "Mrs. Vandeleur, all that you have been saying is extremely interesting. But, to take your own admissions, Lina is young, exceptionally beautiful, and essentially womanly. That being the case, she must necessarily give and inspire love. Although she is exceedingly intelligent, she makes no claim to mental or spiritual gifts above the average. Although you and I may agree that she is made of 'spirit, fire, and dew,' and that the 'good stars stood in her horoscope,' to most people she would only appear a charmingly attractive girl, whom any man might fall in love with. That is the way in which men, and women too, think and speak of girls, and I am inclined to think such a method of thought will prevail as long as this world of ours. Given these premises, isn't it a good thing that Lina, of whom I am sure you are fond, should be going to marry a man whom you dislike so little as you dislike me?"

"I don't dislike you at all," said the little lady, smiling graciously enough. "There is much in your nature that I admire, and with which I am in accord. Your cousin, on the other hand, is quite remarkably evil, although extremely interesting. But, to go back to your tiresome little love-affair, which of course to you blocks out all other subjects from your mind, and will for a few weeks--what puzzles me is not that Lina should be trying to part from you, but that she should ever have consented to marry you. Did you really in so many words ask her to be your wife? And did she say 'Yes'?"

"Most certainly."

"It is very extraordinary indeed! And I must tell you it was only through my niece Clare that I heard one word of this love-business between you and Lina. The girl herself can hardly be persuaded to speak of you at all."

"Why should you be surprised at our engagement, Mrs. Vandeleur? You must have seen that I loved her."

"To fall in love and to suffer was marked in your hand. With Lina things were different."

She was thinking of that previous marriage of Lina's, which the girl had half confided after the elder lady had half guessed it.

"And now," said Lorin, rising and coming over to Mrs. Vandeleur's table, "as the mischief is done, and your secretary merged in the woman who loves, I have come to throw myself upon your compassion and implore your help. Something--I don't know what--has come between Lina and me. Last night, when I met her on her return from church, she was strangely agitated, although twenty-four hours before I had left her full of love and happiness. She spoke of deferring our marriage, and to-day, when she came to luncheon, her manner towards me had incomprehensibly altered and she barely spoke to me. Some confidence passed in my absence between her and my uncle, and induced him on my return to speak to me about breaking off our engagement. And when, on realising the purport of his stumbling hints, I hurried off here, Lina refused to see me, and sent a message to say that she had a headache and had gone to bed. Mrs. Vandeleur, there must be some reason for this extraordinary change of front. I do not, I will not, believe that it is mere caprice on Lina's part which induces her to treat me thus. Therefore, I come to claim your help. You understand her, you can influence her, you can find out what is the obstacle her imagination--for it can be nothing else--has placed between us. Do this for me out of the kindness of your heart--I beg, I beseech of you!"

She looked up smiling into his handsome, glowing face.

"I promise you I will do my best to serve your cause," she said, holding out her small pale hand; and Lorin, catching at the hope, raised her fingers gratefully to his lips.