"By the way," said Sir Eustace carelessly, "I saw your old flame, Lady Croston, yesterday, and told her you were coming home. She makes a charming widow."
"_What!_" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed his brother, slowly raising himself out of his chair in astonishment. "Is her husband dead?"
"Dead? Yes, died a year ago, and a good riddance too. He appointed me one of his executors; I am sure I don"t know why, for we never liked each other. I think he was the most disagreeable fellow I ever knew.
They say he gave his wife a roughish time of it occasionally. Serve her right, too."
"Why did it serve her right?"
Sir Eustace shrugged his shoulders.
"When a heartless girl jilts the fellow she is engaged to in order to sell herself to an elderly beast, I think she deserves all she gets.
This one did not get half enough; indeed, she has made a good thing of it--better than she expected."
His brother sat down again before he answered in a constrained voice, "Don"t you think you are rather hard on her, Eustace?"
"Hard on her? No, not a bit of it. Of all the worthless women that I know, I think Madeline Croston is the most worthless. Look how she treated you."
"Eustace," broke in his brother almost sharply, "if you don"t mind, I wish you would not talk of her like that to me. I can"t--in short, I don"t like it."
Sir Eustace"s eyegla.s.s dropped out of Sir Eustace"s eye--he had opened it so wide to stare at his brother. "Why, my dear fellow," he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, "you don"t mean to tell me you still care for that woman?"
His brother twisted his great form about uncomfortably in the low chair as he answered, "I don"t know, I"m sure, about caring for her, but I don"t like to hear you say such things about her."
Sir Eustace whistled softly. "I am sorry if I offended you, old fellow,"
he said. "I had no idea that it was still a sore point with you. You must be a faithful people in South Africa. Here the "holy feelings of the heart" are shorter lived. We wear out several generations of them in twelve years."
III
Bottles did not go to bed till late that night. Long after Sir Eustace --who, always careful of his health, never stopped up late if he could avoid it--had vanished, yawning, his brother sat smoking pipe after pipe and thinking. He had sat many times in the same way on a wagon-box in the African veld, or up where the moonlight turned the falls of the Zambesi into a rushing cataract of silver, or alone in his tent when all the camp was sleeping round him. It was a habit of this queer, silent man to sit and think for hours at night, and arose to a great extent from an incapacity to sleep, that was the weak point in his const.i.tution.
As for his meditations, they were various, but mostly the outcome of a curious speculative side to his nature, which he never revealed to the outside world. Dreams of a happiness of which heretofore his hard life had given him no glimpse; semi-mystical, religious meditations upon the great unknown around us; and grand schemes for the regeneration of mankind--all formed part of them.
But there was one central thought, the fixed star of his mind, round which all the others continually revolved, taking their light and colour from it, and that was the thought of Madeline Croston, the woman to whom he had been engaged. Years and years had pa.s.sed since he had seen her face, and yet it was always present to him. Beyond the occasional mention of her name in some society paper--several of which, by the way, he took in for years and conscientiously searched on the chance of finding it--till this evening he had never even seen it or heard it spoken; and yet with all the tenacity of his strong, deep nature he clung to her dear memory. That she had left him to marry another man weighed as nothing in the balance of his love. Once she had loved him, and thereby he was repaid for the devotion of his life. He had no ambitions. Madeline had been his great ambition; and when that had fallen, all the others had fallen with it, even to the dust. He simply did his duty, whatever it might be, as well as in him lay, without fear of blame or hope of praise--shunning men, and never, if he could avoid it, speaking to a woman, content to earn his livelihood, and for the rest rendered colourless by his secret and pathetic pa.s.sion.
And now it appeared that Madeline was a widow, which meant--and his heart beat fast at the thought--that she was a free woman. Madeline was a free woman, and he was within a few minutes" walk of her. No thousands of miles of ocean rolled between them now. He rose, went to the table, and consulted a Red book that lay on it. There was the address--a house in Grosvenor Street. Overcome by an uncontrollable impulse, he went out of the room. Going to his own he found his mackintosh and a round hat, and softly left the house. It was then past two in the morning, pouring with rain, and blowing hard.
He had been a little in London as a lad and remembered the main thoroughfares, so had no great difficulty in finding his way up Piccadilly till he came to Park Lane, into which the Red book told him Grosvenor Square opened. But to find Grosvenor Street itself was a more difficult matter, and at such a time on such a night there was naturally n.o.body to ask--least of all a policeman. At last he found it, and hurried on down the street with a quickening pulse. What he was hurrying to he could not tell, but that over-mastering impulse forced him on quicker and quicker yet.
Suddenly he halted, and examined the number of one of the houses by the faint and struggling light from the nearest lamp. It was _her_ house; now there was nothing between them but a few feet of s.p.a.ce and fourteen inches of brickwork. He crossed over to the other side of the street, and looked up at the house, but could scarcely make it out through the driving rain. There was no light in the house, and no sign of life about the street. But there were both light and life in the heart of this watcher. All the pulses of his blood were astir, keeping time with the commotion of his mind. He stood there in the shadow, gazing at the murky house, heedless of the bitter wind and pelting rain, and felt his life and spirit pa.s.s out of his control into an unknown dominion. The storm that raged around him was nothing to the convulsion of his inner self in that hour of madness, which was yet happiness. Yet as it had arisen thus suddenly, so with equal swiftness it died away, and left him standing there with a chill sense of folly in his mind and of the bitter weather in his body; for on such a night a mackintosh and a dress coat were not adapted to keep the most ardent lover warm. He shivered, and turning, made his way back to Albany, feeling heartily ashamed of himself and his midnight expedition, and heartily glad that no one knew of it except himself.
On the following day Bottles--for convenience" sake we still call him by his old nickname--was obliged to see a lawyer with reference to the money which he had inherited, and to search for a box which had gone astray aboard the steamer; also to buy a tall hat, such as he had not worn for fourteen years; so that between one thing and another it was half-past four before he got back to the Albany. Here he donned the new hat, which did not fit very well, and a new black coat which fitted so well that it seemed to cut into his large frame in every possible direction, and departed, furiously struggling with a pair of gloves, also new, for Grosvenor Street.
A quarter of an hour"s walk, for he knew the road this time, brought him to the house. Glancing for a while at the spot where he had stood on the previous night, he walked up the steps and pulled the bell. Though he looked bold enough outwardly--indeed, rather imposing than otherwise--with his broad shoulders and the great scar on his bronzed face, his breast was full of terrors. In these, however, he had not much time to indulge, for a footman, still decked in the trappings of vicarious grief, opened the door with the most startling prompt.i.tude, and he was ushered upstairs into a small but richly furnished room.
Madeline was not in the room, though to judge from the lace handkerchief lying on the floor by a low chair, and the open novel on a little wicker table alongside, she had not left it long. The footman departed, saying, in a magnificent undertone, that "her ladyship" should be informed, and left our hero to enjoy his sensations. Being one of those people whom suspense of any sort makes fidgety, he employed himself in looking at the pictures and china, even going so far as to walk to a pair of very heavy blue velvet curtains that apparently communicated with another room, and peep through them at a much larger apartment of which the furniture was done up in ghostly-looking bags.
Retreating from this melancholy sight, finally he took up a position on the hearthrug and waited. Would she be angry with him for coming? he wondered. Would it recall things she had rather forget? But perhaps she had already forgotten them--it was so long ago. Would she be very much changed? Perhaps he should not know her. Perhaps--but here he happened to lift his eyes, and there, standing between the two blue velvet curtains, was Madeline, now a woman in the full splendour of a remarkable beauty, and showing as yet, at any rate in that dull November twilight, no traces of her years. There she stood, her large dark eyes fixed upon him with a look of wistful curiosity, her shapely lips just parted to speak, and her bosom gently heaving, as though with trouble.
Poor Bottles! One look was enough. There was no chance of his attaining the blessed haven of disillusionment. In five seconds he was farther out to sea than ever. When she knew that he had seen her she dropped her eyes a little--he saw the long curved lashes appear against her cheek, and moved forward.
"How do you do?" she said softly, extending her slim, cool hand.
He took the hand and shook it, but for the life of him could think of nothing to say. Not one of the little speeches he had prepared would come into his mind. Yet the desperate necessity of saying something forced itself upon him.
"How do you do?" he e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed with a jerk. "It--it"s very cold, isn"t it?"
This remark was such an utter and ludicrous _fiasco_ that Lady Croston could not choose but laugh a little.
"I see," she said, "that you have not got over your shyness."
"It is a long while since we met," he blurted out.
"I am very glad to see you," was her simple answer. "Now sit down and talk to me; tell me all about yourself. Stop; before you begin--how very curious it is! Do you know I dreamed about you last night--such a curious, painful dream. I dreamed that I was asleep in my room--which indeed I was--and that it was blowing a gale and raining in torrents--which I believe it was also--so there is nothing very wonderful about that. But now comes the odd part. I dreamed that you were standing out in the rain and wind and yet looking at me as though you saw me. I could not see your face because you were in the dark, but I knew it was you. Then I woke up with a start. It was a most vivid dream. And now to-day you have come to see me after all these years."
He shifted his legs uneasily. Considering the facts of the case, her dream frightened him, which was not strange. Fortunately, at that moment the impressive footman arrived with the tea-things and asked whether he should light the lamps.
"No," said Lady Croston; "put some wood on the fire." She knew that she looked her very best in those half-lights.
Then, when she had given him his tea, delighting him by remembering that he did not like sugar, she fell to drawing him out about the wild life he had been leading.
"By the way," she said presently, "perhaps you can tell me--a few days ago I bought a book for my boy"--she had two children--"all about brave deeds and that sort of thing, and in it there was a story of a volunteer officer in South Africa (the name was not mentioned) which interested me very much. Did you ever hear of it? It was this: The officer was in command of a fort containing a force that was operating against a native chief. While he was away the chief sent a flag of truce down to the fort, which was fired on by some of the volunteers in the fort, because there was a man among the truce party against whom they had a spite.
Just afterwards the officer returned, and was very angry that such a thing had been done by Englishmen, whose duty it was, he said, to teach all the world what honour meant.
"Now comes the brave part of the story. Without saying any more, and notwithstanding the entreaties of his men, who knew that in all probability he was going to a death by torture, for he was so brave that the natives had set a great price upon him, wishing to kill him and use his body for medicine, which they thought would make them as brave as he was, that officer rode out far away into the mountains with only an interpreter and a white handkerchief, till he came to the chief"s stronghold. But when the natives saw him coming, holding up his white handkerchief, they did not fire at him as his men had fired at them, because they were so astonished at his bravery that they thought he must be mad or inspired. So he came straight on to the walls of the stronghold, called to the chief and begged his pardon for what had happened, and then rode away again unharmed. Shortly afterwards, the chief, having captured some of the officer"s volunteers, whom in the ordinary course of affairs he would have tortured to death, sent them back again untouched, with a message to the effect that he would show the English officer that he was not the only man who could behave "like a gentleman." I should like to know that man. Do you know who he was?"
Bottles looked uncomfortable, as well he might, for it was an incident in his own career; but her praise and enthusiasm sent a flush of pride into his face.
"I believe it was some fellow in the Basuto War," he said, prevaricating with peculiar awkwardness.
"Oh, then it _is_ a true story?"
"Yes--that is, it is partially true. There was nothing heroic about it.
It was a necessary act if our honour as fair opponents was to continue to be worth anything."
"But who was the man?" she asked, fixing her dark eyes on him suspiciously.
"The man!" he stammered. "Oh, the man--well, in short----" and he stopped.
"In short, _George_," she put in, for the first time calling him by his Christian name, "that man was _you_, and I am so proud of you, George."
It was very hateful to him in a way, for he loathed that kind of personal adulation, even from her. He was so intensely modest he had never even reported the incident in question; it had come out in some roundabout way. Yet he could not but feel happy that she had found him out. It was a great deal to him to have moved her, and her sparkling eyes and heaving bosom showed that she was somewhat moved.
He looked up and his eyes caught hers; the room was nearly dark now, but the bright flame from the wood the servant had put on the fire played upon her face. His eyes caught hers, and there was a look in them from which he could not escape, even if he had wished to do so. She had thrown her head back so that the coronet of her glossy hair rested upon the back of her low seat, and thus, without strain, could look straight up into his face. He had risen, and was standing by the mantelpiece. A slow, sweet smile grew upon the perfect face, and the dark eyes became soft and luminous as though they shone through tears.
In another second it had ended, as she thought that it would end and had intended that it should end. The great strong man was down--yes, down on his knees before her, one trembling hand catching at the arm of her chair, and the other clasping her tapering fingers. There was no hesitation or awkwardness about him now, the greatness of his long-pent pa.s.sion inspired him, and he told her all without let or stop--all that he had suffered for her sake throughout those lonely years, all his wretched hopelessness, keeping nothing back.
Much she did not understand; such a pa.s.sion as this was too deep to be fathomed by her shallow lines, too soaring for her to net in her world-straitened imagination. Once or twice even his exalted notions made her smile: it seemed ridiculous, knowing the world as she did, that any man should think thus of _any_ woman. Nor, when at length he had finished, did she attempt an answer, feeling that her strength lay in silence, for she had a poor case. At least, the only argument that she used was a purely feminine one, but perfectly effective. She bent her beautiful face towards him, and he kissed it again and again.