Victoria threw back her head. He remembered that scornful gesture in her youth.
"What did that matter to you? In this house!"
She looked round the room, with its contents.
"It did matter to me," he said stubbornly. "My collections are the only satisfaction left to me--by you, Lady Tatham--and others. They are to me in the place of children. I love my bronzes--and my marbles--as you--I suppose--love your son. It sounds incredible to you, no doubt"--the sneer was audible--"but it is so."
"Even if it were so--it is twenty years ago. You have replaced what you lost a hundred times."
"I have never replaced it. And it is now out of my reach--in the Berlin Museum--bought by that fellow Jensen, their head man, who goes nosing like a hound all over Europe--and is always poaching in my preserves."
Victoria looked at him in puzzled amazement. Was this mad, this childish bitterness, a pose?--or was there really some breakdown of the once powerful brain? She began again--less confidently.
"I have told you--I repeat--how sorry she is--how fully she admits she was wrong. But just consider how she has paid for it! Your allowance to her--you must let me speak plainly--could not keep her and her child decently. Her family have been unfortunate; she has had to keep them as well as herself. And the end of it is that she--and your child--your own child--have come pretty near to starvation."
He sat immovable. But Victoria rose to her task. Her veil thrown back from the pale austerity of her beauty, she poured out the story of Netta and Felicia, from a heart sincerely touched. The sordid years in Florence, the death of Netta"s mother, the bankruptcy of her father, the bitter struggle amid the Apuan Alps to keep themselves and their wretched invalid alive--she described them, as they had been told to her, not rhetorically, for neither she nor Netta Melrose was capable of rhetoric, but with the touches and plain details that bring conviction.
"They have been _hungry_--for the peasants" food. Your wife and child have had to be content day after day with a handful of bread and a _salata_ gathered from the roadside; while every franc they could earn was spent upon a sick man. Mrs. Melrose is a shadow. I suspect incurable illness. Your little daughter arrived fainting and emaciated at my house.
But with a few days" rest and proper food she has revived. She is young.
She has not suffered irreparably. One sees what a lovely little creature she might be--and how full of vivacity and charm. Mr. Melrose--you would be proud of her! She is like you--like what you were, in your youth. When I think of what other people would give for such a daughter! Can you possibly deny yourself the pleasure of taking her back into your life?"
"Very easily! Your sentimentalism will resent it; I a.s.sure you, nevertheless, that it would give me no pleasure whatever."
"Ah, but consider it again," she pleaded, earnestly. "You do not know what you are refusing--how much, and how little. All that is asked is that you should acknowledge them--provide for them. Let them stay here a few weeks in the year--what could it matter to you in this immense house?--or if that is impossible, at least give your wife a proper allowance--you would spend it three times over in a day on things like these"--her eye glanced toward a superb ewer and dish, of _verre eglomisee_, standing between her and Melrose--"and let your daughter take her place as your heiress! She ought to marry early--and marry brilliantly. And later--perhaps--in her children--"
Melrose stood up.
"I shall not follow you into these dreams," he said fiercely. "She is not my heiress--and she never will be. The whole of my property"--he spoke with hammered emphasis--"will pa.s.s at my death to my friend and agent and adopted son--Claude Faversham."
He spoke with an excitement his physical state no longer allowed him to conceal. At last--he was defeating this woman who had once defeated him; he was denying and scorning her, as she had once denied and scorned him.
That her cause was an impersonal and an unselfish one made no difference.
He knew the strength of her character and her sympathies. It was sweet to him to refuse her something she desired. She had never yet given him the opportunity! In the twenty years since they had last faced each other, he was perfectly conscious that he had lost mentally, morally, physically; whereas she--his enemy--bore about with her, even in her changed beauty, the signs of a life lived fruitfully--a life that had been worth while.
His bitter perception of it, his hidden consciousness that he had probably but a short time, a couple of years at most, to live, only increased his satisfaction in the "No"--the contemptuous and final "No!"
that he had opposed, and would oppose, to her impertinent interference with his affairs.
Victoria sat regarding him silently, as he walked to the mantelpiece, rearranged a few silver objects standing upon it, and then turned--confronting her again.
"You have made Mr. Faversham your heir?" she asked him after a pause.
"I have. And I shall take good care that he does nothing with my property when he inherits it so as to undo my wishes with regard to it."
"That is to say--you will not even allow him to make--himself--provision for your wife and daughter?"
"Beyond what was indicated in the letter to your son? No! certainly not.
I shall take measures against anything of the sort."
Victoria rose.
"And he accepts your condition--your bequest to him, on these terms?"
Melrose smiled.
"Certainly. Why not?"
"I am sorry for Mr. Faversham!" said Victoria, in a different voice, the colour sparkling on her cheek.
"Because you think there will be a public opinion against him--that he will be boycotted in this precious county? Make yourself easy, Lady Tatham. A fortune such as he will inherit provides an easy cure for such wounds."
Victoria"s self-control began to break down.
"I venture to think he will not find it so," she said, with quickened breath. "In these days it is not so simple to defy the common conscience--as it once was. I fear indeed that Mr. Faversham has already lost the respect of decent men!"
"By becoming my agent?"
"Your tool--for actions--cruel, inhuman things--degrading to both you and him."
She had failed. She knew it! And all that remained was to speak the truth to him, to defy and denounce him.
Melrose surveyed her.
"The ejectment order has been served at Mainstairs to-day, I believe; and the police have at last plucked up their courage to turn those shiftless people out. There, too, I understand, Lady Tatham, you have been meddling."
"I have been trying to undo some of your wrong-doing," she said, with emotion. "And now--before I go--you shall not prevent me from saying that I regard it perhaps as your last and worst crime to have perverted the conscience of this young man! He has been well thought of till now: a decent fellow sprung from decent people. You are making an outcast--a pariah of him. And you think _money_ will compensate him! When you and I knew each other, Edmund"--the name slipped out--"you had a _mind_--one of the shrewdest I ever knew. I appeal to that. It is not so much now that you are wicked or cruel--you are playing the _fool_! And you are teaching this young man to do the same."
She stood confronting him, holding herself tensely erect--a pale, imperious figure--the embodiment of all the higher ideals and traditions of the cla.s.s to which they both belonged.
In her agitation she had dropped her glove. Melrose picked it up.
"On that I think, Lady Tatham, we will say farewell. I regret I have not been able to oblige you. My wife comes from a needy cla.s.s--accustomed to manage on a little. My daughter has not been brought up to luxury. Had she remained with me, of course, the case would have been different. But you will find they will do very well on what I have provided for them. I advise you not to waste your pity. And as for Mr. Faversham, he will take good care of himself. He frames excellently. And I hope before long to see him married--to a very suitable young lady."
They remained looking at each other, for a few seconds, in silence. Then Victoria said quietly, with a forward step:
"I bid you good evening."
He stood at the door, his fingers on the handle, his eyes glittering and malicious.
"I should have liked to have shown you some of my little collections,"
he said, smiling. "That _verre eglomisee_, for instance"--he pointed to it--"it"s magnificent, though rather decadent. They have nothing like it in London or Paris. Really--you must go?"
He threw the door open, bowing profoundly.
"Dixon!"
A voice responded from the farther end of the corridor.
"Tell her ladyship"s car to come round. Excuse my coming to the door, Lady Tatham. I am an old man."
The car sped once more through the gloom of the park. Victoria sat with hands locked on her knee, possessed by the after tremors of battle.