Chapter XXVIII: Only a Bit of Gold Filigree

Lord Stratharden sat in his own bedroom in the little maisonette that opportune whitewashing of his had allowed him to return to as if he had never fled from it, and pursued a peculiar employment with interest.

On the floor beside him, and even in his preoccupation he was careful not to let cigarette ashes fall in them, were two open boxes, the entire wardrobe of a woman who, if she had little, had it dainty. Nothing was marked and everything was almost new.

Stratharden turned up the last layer in the last box with the patience of a man who is thorough, even though he expects nothing.

At last he found something that flushed his sallow cheek.

“My God!” he said softly, because in his youth he had believed in one. “This thing--and me!”

For he knew what he had in his hand as a man knows a trinket with which he has tried--and failed--to buy a woman. Only a bit of gold filigree with a turquoise N on it--a cheap offer for a woman’s soul and body if it had only possessed the value it looked and not a thousand thousand times more.

“So she kept it. She was a clever devil!” he thought, but the look of the pin made a devil in him as he held it. His world would have been loud in incredulous laughter if they had known what was in his mind. Never in all his variegated life had Stratharden’s soul or mind, or flesh even, turned with a real emotion to any woman but this one, who had only cared for another man. He thought of the women who had given him all she denied him; was sick again as he had been in their arms, because there was no pleasure in any woman’s kisses but hers; cursed aloud because for all his pains he had been “faithful to her in his fashion” in many a gray dawn and midnight madness. Oh, he owed her a debt--a debt! Never in all his life had any woman quickened his pulses in him; never, try as he might, had he been able to care. It was a good debt--and he would pay it. Pay it so that Ninon’s rotting flesh should feel it in her grave.

“Her daughter!” exclaimed Lord Stratharden, and did not know his mouth was gray. “And I did it for the chance. I never, as God’s my witness, believed in it.”

But he believed now. He sat, an old man, racked with accusing thoughts. And Ninon had died young, out of her torture--and what his reflections were is not good to write.

A noise, that in another house would have been called brawling, brought him out of his thoughts in a flash. Quick as he was he had but time to get those open boxes into a safe place before the winning side in that loud fight was on him.

Mrs. Keith, her hand tingling from the crack that had blinded James, stood beside him. And the man who meant to put back the clock one way or another lifted his eyebrows at her in cool inquiry.

“Is David dead--or Ardmore burned?” he asked.

“Ye’ve done it,” she said, and it was not an answer; nor did she trouble to close the door. “Ye spied on me till ye found her out, and now ye’ve spirited her away. Ye and yer heathen, and Buff Ogilvie, that I thought his mother’s blood had leavened till yer own was out of him.”

Lord Stratharden shut the door and handed to her a glass of neat whisky; and as he spoke the wonder on his face was real.

“Drink that and sit down. You’re exhausted. And then tell me what you’re talking about.”

“Ye well know!” She was breathing heavily and she needed the whisky, if it was her enemy’s. When she put down the glass her hand was steady. “Oh, ye well know, Stratharden! Ye can cease yer play-acting and yer eyebrow rounding. That girl that ye wanted--his daughter--brings me here.”

He stopped her as a man stops a ball.

“Are you at that old story?” he asked slowly. “Poor Keith, it isn’t true. There’s no hope of it. That girl lives only in your faithful head. Do you think that I, hopelessly ousted myself, would not be glad to believe in it and give Barnysdale’s wife and brat the go-by, as you’d say? I would, indeed. But that red-haired, black-eyed Clyde girl is nothing but what she seems--Lady Barnysdale’s half-sister. Do you want me to see her? For I will with pleasure.” And he looked so guileless and truthful that she feared him as she had never feared him before.

“Bring her out then, if ye’d see her,” said she. “For a man who sent Buff Ogilvie to her and then took her by ye’re heathen, ye’re not overclever.” She had warmed to her work, perhaps aided by the whisky, and she forgot caution. She raved at him and told all she knew, and he sat like a stone till she was done. Then he touched her shoulders forgivingly.

“You’re quite foolish,” he said gravely. “As for the girl, she is only an impostor, and all you’ve told me is guesswork. What would I do with her? And as for Ah Lee, he left my service a month ago. I know no more of him than the dead. If she’s disappeared it’s----What did you mean about Buff?” he asked with a sudden flash that seemed natural, though it had required a supreme effort to defer the question. He could not for his life see how Buff could be mixed up in it, and yet some words came back to him queerly.

“I’ll tell him!” She fairly spat the words at him. “I believe no single word ye’ve said. I----”

The room went round, turned dark; if some one fell Mrs. Keith did not hear the crash of it.

“Very like a fit,” said Stratharden musingly, five minutes after. “Queer stuff, whisky.”

He rang the bell and gave a kindly order. The old woman was such a faithful servant and apparently so ill; and he really could not have Buff told things by anyone but himself.

It was nothing to him that through that long night a girl was calling for Buff by a name his father had never heard, but it was important that Buff was the only person to be feared in the whole business.

“And that good Keith has forewarned me of him,” said Lord Stratharden, and went peacefully to his bed.