Chapter XIX: The Tragedy on the Polo Grounds

It was, after all, by no woman’s wile that Christina brought Valentine Ambleton to Sunstead once again.

While she was spending her days in fretting over her fate, and chafing sorely at the failure of her scheme to force the man she called her enemy to become her friend, destiny—a sad and tragic destiny—hastened this period of inactivity to a close.

One hot summer evening, weeks after Grace’s departure from Dynechester, her butler sought Lady Wentworth as she sat listlessly on the lawn alone, and informed her that Mr. Ambleton desired to see her. Christina was wide awake in an instant; she looked at the servant incredulously.

“Mr. Sacha Ambleton, I suppose you mean. Tell him to come to me out here.”

“No, my lady, not Mr. Sacha, but Mr. Ambleton,” the man answered.

Christina rose to her feet, and then sank back in her chair again, the folds of her soft diaphanous black gown falling gracefully about her.

“Ah!” she said, quietly enough, though her pulses were beating rapidly, “ah! just so. Well, I will see Mr. Ambleton out here. Tell him to come through the conservatory, and, James, bring coffee and some cigars.”

She sat and watched for Valentine to appear through the open doorway of the conservatory.

She did not trouble herself very much to question why he should suddenly pay her this visit; it was enough for her that he had come.

Valentine emerged from the house onto the lawn; he walked deliberately.

He was glancing about him in a sorrowful sort of way.

It was some time since he had been at Sunstead; the place had a pathetically familiar air to him, and brought back hosts of memories, memories of the days when Mark had scampered and jumped about the grounds a merry little lad in a brown holland smock, and Sacha and Grace had played with him, and driven the old head gardener wild with terror at their antics. And now——

Christina, as she rose to greet him, saw that his face was pale, and his eyes wet.

“You have come to tell me something disagreeable,” she said; she trembled a little, and did not hold out her hand, and perhaps for the first time in her life, she completely forgot herself for the space of a moment.

Her voice, her words had something childlike in them, and as Valentine saw that she trembled, he immediately felt some pity steal out toward her.

“I have come to fetch you,” he said, simply and very gently. “Mark wants you.”

“Where is he?” Christina’s hands were held tightly together, and a different emotion swept over her.

She guessed his mission now, and she resented it sharply, for she knew, only too well, what the material significance of this mission meant to her henceforward.

“Is he ill?” she queried on, and her voice was clear and hard. “What has happened? Please do not give me your news in little bits, Mr. Ambleton; I prefer it all at once.”

“Mark has had an accident; he is very ill.”

“Will he die?” asked Christina.

For the second time something childlike stole over her. She was, after all, very young, and whatever her faults had been, she was now face to face with tragedy, and Valentine remembered this, and remembered her youth, and in this moment he was very near to forgiving her her faults.

He answered her in the same simple way.

“You must try not to look for the worst. Mark is young. We must hope.”

“What has happened?” Christina asked again.

And he told her tersely the story of that same day; how Sir Mark, it seemed, had gone to some club grounds near London to play a game of polo with one or two of his friends, in order to try a pony he had just bought, and how he had been unfortunately struck on the head in a close scrimmage, and been thrown and dragged, the pony taking fright, and racing off with its senseless burden a considerable distance before it could be stopped.

“Mark lies at the clubhouse. He has had every attention, and three doctors have seen him. Happily his companions thought of sending to us, and I have hastened to you without loss of an hour. I thought I might tell this better than any written message, but I am clumsy at this sort of work. You must forgive me. I hoped to have softened things a little.”

“I am no coward,” Christina said. Her brain was revolving rapidly. She knew that her husband would die, perhaps he was already dead. This gave her no heartache, since for many a week now she realized that she hated this man she had married, hated him thoroughly. But death robbed her of more than a husband. It took from her power and wealth, and worse than this, it restored to those whom she had dominated, all that had once been theirs, morally, if not actually.

With Sir Mark’s death his title would die, as he left no son, and there was no other heir, and with his death Sunstead and all its domains would pass to his Cousin Valentine, eldest son of his father’s sister.

This was something that Christina had always known, something she had always hated to know, because in her imagination it was a prospect that could give to Valentine’s sister all that Christina desired to take from her.

Up to that time, too, when other feelings had begun to dawn in her thoughts of Valentine himself, she had given him an equal share of resentment with Grace; but by degrees this resentment had gone, and now as Christina stood in the summer twilight beside his tall form, she remembered only that she would be free, possibly was already free, and that this man about whom she had dreamed and pondered so much, would be master in her husband’s place, and that, as such, was more desirable to her in every respect.

The memory of what Sacha had said about Polly’s attraction for Valentine came back to sting her; but Christina put the sting aside. Would it be possible for Polly or any other woman to stand against her? True, Valentine had given her no right to imagine he was conquerable, but then Christina had not been placed as she would be placed in the future.

A wife and a widow were two widely different creatures in the moral philosophy of such a man as Valentine, and Christina fell back on the only salve she had been able to find during these past weeks for her vanity, the certainty that had she been unmarried she would have brought Valentine to her feet whenever she had desired.

The easy complacency with which Sacha had tried to embark on a flirtation with her had but emphasized the deliberation of Valentine never to approach her.

This had been her one touch of self-satisfaction and consolation, and the fact that Valentine should have set aside all his rules and have hastened to be with her on this particular evening, framed itself in Christina’s wholly selfish mind now as meaning everything that it did not mean.

She cast her thoughts far ahead in this moment, and she instantly set herself a rôle to play now and in the immediate future.

“I will go with you,” she said, in a low, troubled sort of way. “Of course I will go, if you tell me poor Mark really wants me; but——” She paused. “But,” she went on, more hurriedly, “he has not wanted me much of late; he has made his life so far apart from me—it is only natural I should hesitate lest I make a mistake now.”

“There can never be a mistake in being generous under certain circumstances,” Valentine said, gently.

He did not tell her that poor Mark would not know she had gone to him, that all chance of recognition was over.

He hastened her a little in her preparations, however, for they had a journey before them, and he, for his own part, sorely desired to whisper a loving word to his cousin before the end came.

Somehow or other, almost against himself, Valentine found a sort of tenderness mingle in with his pity for Christina. He was so truly soft-hearted where women were concerned, and Christina appealed to him this night.

She was no longer the brilliant, imperious beauty; she was very young, very unhappy and very pathetic.

She did not shed tears, her emotion seemed too great for any such outlet; she sat very still all the way to town, and her face grew tired and pale as the journey came slowly to an end.

In her black garments—the simplest her wardrobe could produce—there was an air of affinity with that dear, slender girl, whose wonderful eyes, and fresh voice haunted him all the time, and anything that could even suggest Polly to him was dear to Valentine.

He was, therefore, tenderness itself to Mark’s wife. No one seeing them together, and noting this tenderness, would have believed that, up to a few hours before, this had been to him a woman he had despised and almost hated.

There was not a trace of the worldling or the courtier about Valentine. He was absolutely sincere, and just as he had held anger and contempt in his heart for Christina in the year that was gone, so now he put aside those harsh feelings and gave her pity in all sincerity.

She touched him sharply, and once she brought the color flashing half-shamedly into his face. It was when she spoke of the past.

“Ah!” Christina had said, breaking a long, long silence suddenly; “ah! how right you were! How right! and how wrong I have been! No wonder you have hated me so dreadfully all this time, but you did not know how you hurt me, did you? And you could not know, either, that I regretted my willfulness immediately. But I tried to do my best, indeed I did, Valentine. Please always remember this, that I did care for Mark, and I would have cared more and more if—if only he had let me. It was a big mistake, and you were right. I have wanted to say this to you ever so many times, but you would never give me the chance!”

“You must not fret about these things, now,” Valentine said, soothingly.

Her distress was so real to him he felt as though he were in close contact with an aching human heart, a heart suddenly charged with the sorrow of a folly, worked into a tragedy.

This was about all Christina did say on that long, long journey. She was content to sit in her corner of the railway carriage and feel herself watched over and tended by this man, whose allegiance she had craved for so sharply, and who had seemed so far away.

To Valentine it was a torture each time the slow train was brought to anchor at some small station; every minute was a minute lost. Yet he clung to the hope of seeing Mark again, and it was a great comfort to know that Grace was with the poor fellow. Mark would not know that Grace was there, for consciousness had left him while his injuries were being attended to; but there had been a moment in which Valentine had bent over his bed, and had been rewarded by a flash of recognition from the dull eyes.

It had been Grace’s suggestion that Christina should be brought. It was a duty to bring the wife to her dying husband, but Christina little guessed how much this duty was costing Valentine. She had no desire to reach London.

If the train could have gone round and round in a circle she would have been content. Her imagination conjured the present into a dream of the future, that future when, as Valentine’s wife, it would be her due to receive all his care and anxious thought.

“I shall win him,” she told herself, confidently. Now that she had come in direct contact with him again, she felt she had been right to have faith in her powers, for she saw his weakness. Nevertheless, he was not a man to be won as she had won Mark Wentworth.

It was not merely physical loveliness that would have sway with this man; there must be a nature as well, just that gentle, half-timid nature that the conventional man credits the conventional woman with possessing. Valentine was, so Christina quickly determined, one of those men who did not care for independence in a woman, but who would lose his head and his heart to a delicate, clinging creature who dared make no step alone.

“He to care for Polly!” she said to herself, scornfully. “Why, the idea is absurd—that is, unless Polly is changed altogether. All her life she has been a spitfire and an independent creature. She could not possibly attract this man.”

London reached, Valentine piloted Lady Wentworth into a cab, and they drove away through gaslit streets on and on till they reached the country-like neighborhood where poor Mark Wentworth lay dying.

It was a long drive, and the cab jolted roughly from time to time, but the air of the summer night was cool and fresh, and the sky spread its star-spangled canopy in wide, dark beauty over the city.

When they reached their destination it was growing toward midnight.

Grace came down into the entrance of the clubhouse to receive them.

She spoke no word at first, but her two hands went out to Christina, and Christina, remembering the part she had set herself, let her hands rest in Grace’s strong ones.

She looked very white, and frightened, and sad in this moment, and Grace’s heart softened as Valentine’s had done.

“Oh! I am so sorry for you—so sorry,” Grace said, and then the tension of her nerves gave way, and she broke into tears. “Oh! poor Mark!” she said, hoarsely, and she turned away.

Christina did not shed tears, but she was equal to the situation all the same.

“I want to go to him, please,” she said to Valentine, lifting her eyes to him piteously. “Will you take me?”

And Valentine bowed his head, and led the way up the stairs; but he had not gone many steps before he had to turn and support her, and fragile as Christina was in appearance, her weight grew heavier and heavier till, as they came to the top of the stairs, Valentine felt she was unable to move further, and looking down on her pale face pressed against his arm, he saw that her eyes were closed, and he told himself that she had fainted.

The further thought came to him that he had wronged this woman deeply, when he had accused her of having no heart, and a bitter pang of reproach mingled in with his pity for her, and with his grief, deep, true grief for the poor young fellow lying dead in his prime only a few yards away.