He took hold of her left hand, and stretched out his hand to Rayburn and said:
"Come now, sister and brother, as you are going to be!"
He took their two hands and joined them. Over the two hands he clasped his own, and looking swiftly from one to the other he said:
"Afterwards I will say the words that I cannot speak here." And then, with a sudden change of tone and manner which came as a quick surprise to both Carol and Rayburn, he went on:
"Rayburn, this is my sister. Carol, Rayburn tells me that he wants to marry you, and I suppose----"
"You needn"t suppose anything at all, Vane. I"ve said yes already. If you and Sir Arthur will only say yes too----"
Vane drew back from her, and looked round toward Sir Arthur and Dora.
Rayburn, having gone through the formalities of introduction which Vane"s tact had made necessary, held out his hand and they shook hands.
"It is rather unceremonious, Miss Maxwell," he said, addressing her for the first time by a name that was not her own, "but----"
"But, my dear Carol, you are forgetting that you are hostess to-night,"
said Sir Arthur, "and I think there are two of our guests who have not been, as one would say in Society, properly introduced."
"Oh, of course; I"m so sorry," said Carol. "Dora, forgive me. I know you will. I was too happy just now to think of anything else. Mr. Ernshaw, this is Dora. Dora, this is Mr. Ernshaw. I hope you will be very good friends. That"s a rather unconventional way of introduction, I must say."
As the last words left her laughing lips, and she was looking exquisitely dainty and desirable in a quietly magnificent costume which had cost as much as many much advertised wedding dresses, Dora and Ernshaw faced each other for the first time. She had seen him with Vane at the ordination service in Worcester Cathedral, but they had never met before under the sanction of social acquaintance.
She looked at him and he looked at her, and as their eyes met some impulse in the soul of both made them hold out their hands as people do not usually do when they are introduced in ordinary drawing-room style.
Ernshaw"s went out straight.
"Miss Russell," he said, even while her hand was moving slowly towards his.
"My dear Mr. Ernshaw, whatever you have to say, I"m afraid I will have to ask you to keep it just for a little," said Sir Arthur, as the door swung open. "Here is Koda Bux, and he does not allow me to be late for dinner; he has many virtues, but that is the best of them. Mr. Rayburn, you will take Carol in? Mr. Ernshaw, will you give your arm to Miss Russell, and Vane and I will bring up the rear."
"Dad," said Vane, as he gripped his father"s arm, "you have helped to do G.o.d"s work to-night; look at them!"
"You did more when you got out of the cab at the top of the gardens here," he whispered in reply.
"I didn"t do that, dad; she did. She knew, and I didn"t. G.o.d bless her."
"Amen," said his father. "And now we will return to earth and go and eat."
There were not many more delightful dinners eaten in London that night than what Cecil Rayburn called his betrothal feast. He and Carol now understood each other thoroughly. Vane and his father also knew the circ.u.mstances so far as they were concerned, and a little more. Ernshaw and Dora, each knowing just a little more than the others did, began to make friends fast, and therefore rapidly, but Dora was still _decla.s.see_. Carol had already been lifted beyond the confines of that half-sphere which is inhabited by so many thousands of women who are neither maiden, wife, nor widow. Dora was still a dweller in it, knowing all its infamy and shame, and knowing, too, that awful necessity which is so often at once the equivalent and the excuse for sin.
Everyone took Sir Arthur"s hint, and the conversation rattled on around the table as lightly as it might have around any other dinner table in London. Carol and Sir Arthur and Rayburn had it mostly to themselves at first, but after a little the conversation grew more general. Dora and Carol engaged in a really brilliant discussion on the subject of Mrs.
Lynn Linton"s last book, with the result that Carol said that she wouldn"t live for ever at any price, to which Dora replied with just a suspicion of a note of sadness in her voice.
"Yes, Carol, I quite agree with you, or at least if I were you I should do."
"Which," said Ernshaw, "is, I think, as nearly as possible the same thing. Surely if one cannot agree with one"s self----"
"No, Mr. Ernshaw," said Dora, putting her elbows on the table and her chin between her hands. "No, I"m afraid I can hardly agree with you there. After all, our worst enemies are those of our own household, by which of course I mean our immediate surroundings. It is this awful necessity to live, to eat and to have a place to sleep in. Of course you are thinking of what Talleyrand said to the young aristocrat who wanted to live for nothing."
"Yes," said Ernshaw, "I know that. He said he didn"t see the necessity, and I am not altogether certain that he was wrong, but you----"
"Yes, I," she replied in a tone that had a thrill of angry reproach running through it, "I, as you know, am--well--a superfluous woman, one who isn"t wanted, a sort of waste product of the factory that we call civilisation."
"I am afraid you people are getting far too serious in your conversation," said Carol from her end of the table opposite Sir Arthur.
"No, Dora, I really can"t allow it; social problems are not in the menu to-night, and you and Mr. Ernshaw will have to keep them for some other time. Meanwhile, suppose we leave the rest for their smokes, and you come with me and run through that song you are going to sing; we haven"t tried it together for quite a long time, as Mr. Rayburn said when we were on the other side of the Atlantic. Come along."
As she rose from her chair, Koda Bux, who had been standing immovable behind his master, opened the door, and as Carol, daintily and yet most plainly dressed, pa.s.sed through, his sombre eyes lit up as though by an inspiration of long past days, and his teeth came together and he said in his soul:
"It is the daughter of the Mem Sahib; what marvel is this! If there is vengeance to be done, may mine be the hand. Inshallah! I should die content, even if it was only a minute afterwards. He has his kismet, and I have mine. Allah will give it to me; but they may be the same. Once the roomal round his neck, and his breath would be already in his mouth.
Dog and son of a dog, he would be better dead!"
It had been arranged that Carol and Dora should take up their abode with Sir Arthur, so that Carol might be married from her father"s house.
Under the circ.u.mstances it was only natural that the wedding was to be absolutely private, and it was already decided that immediately after the wedding Rayburn and Carol should leave for a month in Paris, and then go on to Western Australia, where most of Rayburn"s mining properties were. He also owned one side of a street in Perth and a country estate with a big bungalow-built house on the eastern hills overlooking the Swan River.
The only difficulty appeared ahead to Sir Arthur was some mysterious connection with the Raleighs and the Garthornes. It was, of course, impossible that the wedding could take place without their knowledge, if Sir Arthur was to give Carol away as he intended to do, and yet the moment that Garthorne"s name was mentioned Carol had turned white to the lips and a look of deadly fear had come into her eyes.
"No, no," she said, "not them, I can"t tell you why, and you mustn"t ask me. You have been very good to me, and you are going to do more for me than ever was done to a girl like me before, but sooner than meet them I would run away again as I did from Melville Gardens. I would, really, but you must not ask me why; there are some things that cannot be told."
After this Sir Arthur, finding it impossible to get any inkling of the mystery from Carol, asked Dora if she could tell him the meaning of it, and she too turned white. She did not reply for a few moments, and then she said:
"No, Sir Arthur, I cannot tell you. All I can say is that Carol is perfectly right. It would be utterly impossible for her to meet either Sir Reginald Garthorne or his son, and of course she could not meet Mrs.
Garthorne without meeting her husband. There is a reason, and a very solemn one, too, for this, but I can a.s.sure you, Sir Arthur----"
"That is enough, Miss Russell," said Sir Arthur gravely. "I am perfectly satisfied, and I have no right to ask for an explanation. The wedding shall be absolutely private; no one shall be asked except ourselves.
Vane shall marry them early in the morning, we will come back here for lunch, and then they will go straight off to Paris. I will tell the Garthornes about it afterwards."
"Yes," said Dora, "I think that would be best."
That night Carol and Dora had a talk in Carol"s room. It was rather a discussion perhaps than a conversation, and the question was whether Sir Arthur and Vane should be told the dreadful secret which Carol had discovered at Reginald Garthorne"s wedding. Carol, clean-hearted and straightforward as she was naturally, shrank in horror from such a revelation as this; but Dora, whose nature was deeper, and who had a stronger religious bias, felt that at all hazards the truth should be told, horrible as it was.
"That man Garthorne," she said, "is a brute. I am perfectly certain that he deliberately made your brother drunk that day at Oxford--I mean that he took advantage of the weakness that you discovered to tempt him to go on drinking, so that he might get drunk on the most important morning of his life. He knew very well what he was doing. He knew if he could only make him drunk that morning, everything would be at an end between him and Miss Raleigh."
"But, my dear Dora, suppose that is so, and I hope it isn"t," replied Carol, "how on earth can you have found that out? Of course, if it really is so, Vane and Sir Arthur ought to know of it, and, well, I suppose of the other thing too, dreadful and all as it is, but----"
"I see what you mean," said Dora, "and I will tell you why. In the first place, when we were at the flat, Bernard--I mean Mr. Falcon--told me one or two things Mr. Garthorne had said to him when they were getting confidential over their whiskies, and I had a few minutes" talk with Mr. Ernshaw this evening which--well, what Mr. Falcon told me and what he said were the two and two that made four. I am afraid that is not very grammatical, but it is true. Of course he wouldn"t have told me if I had not said something about it; but the moment he told me about your brother"s collapse that morning the truth came to me like a flash.
Reginald Garthorne is a scoundrel, and his father is worse, for he is a hypocrite as well as a scoundrel. He pretends to be Sir Arthur"s friend--he has done so for years. He has allowed his son to steal Vane"s life-long love from him, knowing all that he himself did--and, well, no--I can"t say the rest."
"You mean," said Carol quietly, and with a note of hardness in her voice, "you mean that he is my father. It is very dreadful, isn"t it?"
"Yes, Dora, it is, but you are not to blame after all; you didn"t know, and of course we must admit that Mr. Garthorne didn"t know so morally.
You are both quite innocent there, but there is someone else just now.
We"ve been friends and comrades now for a long time, tell me, dear, does Mr. Rayburn know?"
"I have told him everything," replied Carol, with an effort which she could not conceal, even from Dora.
"Yes, everything, even the very worst. You know when, as he says, he fell in love with me and, as I told you, began to treat me altogether differently, and then asked me to marry him, I said "No." I felt that I couldn"t say "Yes" honestly unless he knew everything. I had got very fond of him, and I suppose that was the reason why. I felt that I had to tell him the truth, and so I told him. Of course it wouldn"t have been the straight thing to do anything else. If he had been like other men----"
"But he isn"t," said Dora; "all men are not men, you know, and he"s a man, and you are just about as lucky a girl as ever got a real man for her husband. Now I see what you mean. Yes, of course, it would be wicked to tell the truth just now. In a week you will be married and away to Australia to live a new life in a new world. Then no one will know Mrs.
Rayburn, the wife of the millionaire, except as Mrs. Rayburn, but after that vengeance must be done."