"I see. Thanks for the confidence you have in Aggie. I daresay I know how Drusilla feels. I"ve--I"ve had a bad turn or two, myself, lately, and--but, never mind." He was silent for some time, evidently turning something over in his mind. "By the way, what does Chase say about it?"
he asked suddenly.
She started and caught her breath. "Mr. Chase? He--he hasn"t said anything about it," she responded lamely. "He"s--he"s not that sort,"
"Ah," reflected Deppingham, "he _is_ a gentleman?"
Genevra flushed. "Yes, I"m sure he is."
"I say, Genevra," he said, looking straight into her rebellious eyes, "you"re in love with Chase. Why don"t you marry him?"
"You--you are really delirious, Deppy," she cried. "The fever has----"
"He"s good enough for any one--even you," went on his lordship coolly.
"He may have a wife," said she, collecting her wits with rare swiftness.
"Who knows? Don"t be silly, Deppy."
"Rubbish! Haven"t you stuffed Aggie and me full of the things you found out concerning him before he left Thorberg--and afterward? The letters from the Amba.s.sador"s wife and the glowing things your St. Petersburg friends have to say of him, eh? He comes to us well recommended by no other than the Princess Genevra, a most discriminating person. Besides, he"d give his head to marry you--having already lost it."
"You are very amusing, Deppy, when you try to be clever. Is there a clause in that silly old will compelling me to marry any one?"
"Of course not, my dear Princess; but I fancy you"ve got a will of your own. Where there"s a will, there"s a way. You"d marry him to-morrow if--if----"
"If I were not amply prepared to contest my own will?" she supplied airily.
"No. If your will was not wrapped in convention three centuries old. You won"t marry Chase because you are a princess. That"s the long and the short of it. It isn"t your fault, either. It"s born in you. I daresay it would be a mistake, after a fashion, too. You"d be obliged to give up being a princess, and settle down as a wife. Chase wouldn"t let you forget that you were a wife. It would be hanging over you all the time.
Besides, he"d be a husband. That"s something to beware of, too."
"Deppy, you are ranting frightfully," she said consolingly. "You should go to sleep."
"I"m awfully sorry for you, Genevra."
"Sorry for me? Dear me!"
"You"re tremendously gone on him."
"Nonsense! Why, I couldn"t marry Mr. Chase," she exclaimed, irritable at last. "Don"t put such things into my head--I mean, don"t get such things into that ridiculous old head of yours. Are you forgetting that I am to become Karl"s wife in June? You are babbling, Deppy----"
"Well, let"s say no more about it," he said, lying back resignedly.
"It"s too bad, that"s all. Chase is a man. Karl isn"t. You loathe him. I don"t wonder that you turn pale and look frightened. Take my advice!
Take Chase!"
"Don"t!" she cried, a break in her voice. She arose and went swiftly toward the window. Then she stopped and turned upon him, her lips parted as if to give utterance to the thing that was stirring her heart so violently. The words would not come. She smiled plaintively and said instead: "Good-night! Get a good sleep."
"The same to you," he called feverishly.
"Deppy," she said firmly, a red spot in each cheek, her voice tense and strained to a high pitch of suppressed decision, "I shall marry Karl Brabetz. That will be the end of your Mr. Chase."
"I hope so," he said. "But I"m not so sure of it, if you continue to love him as you do now."
She went out with her cheeks burning and a frightened air in her heart.
What right, what reason had he to say such things to her? Her thoughts raced back to Neenah"s airy prophecy.
Bobby Browne and Agnes were approaching from the lower end of the balcony. She drew back into the shadow suddenly, afraid that they might discover in her flushed face the signs of that ugly blow to her pride and her self-respect. "I"m not so sure of it," was whirling in her brain, repeating itself a hundred times over, stabbing her each time in a new and even more tender spot.
"If you continue to love him as you do now," fought its way through the maze of horrid, disturbing thoughts. How could she face the charge: "I"m not so sure of it," unless she killed the indictment "if you love him as you do now?"
Lady Agnes and Browne pa.s.sed by without seeing her and entered the window. She heard him say something to his companion, softly, tenderly--she knew not what it was. And Lady Agnes laughed--yes, nervously. Ah, but Agnes was playing! She was not in love with this man.
It was different. It was not what Neenah meant--nor Deppingham, honest friend that he was.
Down below she heard voices. She wondered--inconsistently alert--whether _he_ was one of the speakers. Thomas Saunders and Miss Pelham were coming in from the terrace. They were in love with each other! They _could_ be in love with each other. There was no law, no convention that said them nay! They could marry--and still love! "If you continue to love him as you do now," battered at the doors of her conscience.
Silently she stole off to her own rooms; stealthily, as if afraid of something she could not see but felt creeping up on her with an evil grin. It was Shame!
Her maid came in and she prepared for bed. Left alone, she perched herself in the window seat to cool her heated face with the breezes that swept on ahead of the storm which was coming up from the sea. Her heart was hot; no breeze could cool it--nothing but the ice of decision could drive out the fever that possessed it. Now she was able to reason calmly with herself and her emotions. She could judge between them. Three sentences she had heard uttered that day crowded upon each other to be uppermost: not the weakest of which was one which had fallen from the lips of Hollingsworth Chase.
"It is impossible--incredible!" she was saying to herself. "I could not love him like that. I should hate him. G.o.d above me, am I not different from those women whom I have known and pitied and despised? Am I not different from Guelma von Herrick? Am I not different from Prince Henri"s wife? Ah, and they loved, too! And is _he_ not different from those other men--those weak, unmanly men, who came into the lives of those women? Ah, yes, yes! He _is_ different."
She sat and stared out over the black sea, lighted fitfully by the distant lightning. There, she p.r.o.nounced sentence upon him--and herself.
There was no place for him in her world. He should feel her disdain--he should suffer for his presumption. Presumption? In what way had he offended? She put her hands to her eyes but her lips smiled--smiled with the memory of the kiss she had returned!
"What a fool! What a fool I am," she cried aloud, springing up resolutely. "I _must_ forget. I told him I couldn"t, but I--I can." Half way across the room she stopped, her hands clenched fiercely. "If--if Karl were only such as he!" she moaned.
[Ill.u.s.tration: "No" she said to herself, "I told him I was keeping them for him."]
She went to her dressing table and resolutely unlocked one of the drawers, as one would open a case in which the most precious of treasures was kept. A cautious, involuntary glance over her shoulder, and then she ran her hand into the bottom of the drawer.
"It was so silly of me," she muttered. "I shall not keep them for him."
The drawer was partly filled with cigarettes. She took one from among the rest and placed its tip in her red lips, a reckless light in her eyes. A match was struck and then her hand seemed to be in the clutch of some invisible force. The light flickered and died in her fingers. A blush suffused her face, her eyes, her neck. Then with a guilty, shamed, tender smile she dropped the cigarette into the drawer. She turned the key.
"No," she said to herself, "I told him that I was keeping them for him."
CHAPTER XXVII
THE TRIAL OF VON BLITZ
The next morning found the weather unsettled. There had been a fierce storm during the night and a nasty mist was blowing up from the sea.
Deppingham kept to his room, although his cold was dissipated. For the first time in all those blistering, trying months, they felt a chill in the air; raw, wet, unexpected.
Chase had been up nearly all of the night, fearful lest the islanders should seize the opportunity to scale the walls under cover of the tempest. All through the night he had been possessed of a spirit of wild bravado, a glorious exaltation: he was keeping watch over her, standing between her and peril, guarding her while she slept. He thought of that ma.s.s of Henner hair--he loved to think of her as a creation of the fanciful Henner--he thought of her asleep and dreaming in blissful security while he, with all the loyalty of an imaginative boy, was standing guard just as he had pictured himself in those heroic days when he subst.i.tuted himself for the story-book knight who stood beneath the battlements and defied the covetous ogre. His thoughts, however, did not contemplate the Princess fair in a state of wretched insomnia, with himself as the disturbing element.
He looked for her at breakfast time. They usually had their rolls and coffee together. When she did not appear, he made more than one pretext to lengthen his own stay in the breakfast-room. "She"s trying to forget yesterday," he reflected. "What was it she said about always regretting?
Oh, well, it"s the way of women. I"ll wait," he concluded with the utmost confidence in the powers of patience.
Selim came to him in the midst of his reflections, bearing a thick, rain-soaked envelope.