She dined alone on the house-boat with her face to the river. Her fright had made her somewhat nervous, and she was inclined to start at every sound. When the meal was over she went up to her favourite retreat on the upper deck. A golden twilight still lingered in the air, and the river was mysteriously calm. But the girl"s heart was full of a heavy restlessness. Each time she heard a punt-pole striking on the bed of the river she raised her head to look.
He came at last--the man for whom her heart waited. He was punting rapidly down-stream, and she could not see his face. Yet she knew him, by the swing of his arms, the goodly strength of his muscles,--and by the suffocating beating of her heart. She saw that one hand was bandaged, and a pa.s.sionate feeling that was almost rapture thrilled through and through her at the sight. Then he shot beyond her vision, and she heard the punt b.u.mp against the house-boat.
"It"s a gentleman to see you, miss," said the Badger, thrusting a grey and grinning visage up the stairs.
"Ask him to come up!" said Hilary, steadying her voice with an effort.
A moment later she rose to receive the man she loved. And her heart suddenly ceased to beat.
"You!" she gasped, in a choked whisper.
He came straight forward. The last light of the day shone on his smooth brown face, with its steady eyes and strong mouth.
"Yes," he said, and still through his quiet tones she seemed to hear a faint echo of the subdued tw.a.n.g which dwellers in the Far West sometimes acquire. "I, John Merrivale, late of California, beg to render to you, Hilary St. Orme, in addition to my respectful homage, that freedom for which you have not deigned to ask."
She stared at him dumbly, one hand pressed against her breast. The ripple of the river ran softly through the silence. Slowly at last Merrivale turned to go.
And then sharply, uncertainly, she spoke.
"Wait, please!" she said.
She moved close to him and laid her hand on the flower-bedecked bal.u.s.trade, trembling very much.
"Why have you done this?" Her quivering voice sounded like a prayer.
He hesitated, then answered her quietly through the gloom.
"I did it because I loved you."
"And what did you hope to gain by it?" breathed Hilary.
He did not answer, and she drew a little nearer as though his silence rea.s.sured her.
"Wouldn"t it have saved a lot of trouble," she said, her voice very low but no longer uncertain, "if you had given me my freedom in the first place? Don"t you think you ought to have done that?"
"I don"t know," Merrivale said. "That fellow spoilt my game. So I offer it to you now--with apologies."
"I should have appreciated it--in the first place," said Hilary, and suddenly there was a ripple of laughter in her voice like an echo of the water below them. "But now I--I--have no use for it. It"s too late. Do you know, Jack, I"m not sure he did spoil your game after all!"
He turned towards her swiftly, and she thrust out her hands to him with a quick sob that became a laugh as she felt his arms about her.
"You hairless monster!" she said. "What woman ever wanted freedom when she could have--Love?"
Two days later Viscount Merrivale"s friends at the club read with interest and some amus.e.m.e.nt the announcement that his marriage to Miss Hilary St. Orme had been fixed to take place on the last day of the month.
Death"s Property
CHAPTER I
A high laugh rang with a note of childlike merriment from the far end of the coffee-room as Bernard Merefleet, who was generally considered a bear on account of his retiring disposition, entered and took his seat near the door. It was a decidedly infectious laugh and perhaps for this reason it was the first detail to catch his attention and to excite his disapproval.
He frowned as he glanced at the menu in front of him.
He had arrived in England after an absence of twenty years in America, where he had made a huge fortune. He was hungering for the quiet unhurried speech of his fellow-countrymen, for the sights and sounds and general atmosphere of English life which for so long had been denied to him. And the first thing he heard on entering the coffee-room of this English hotel was the laugh of an American woman.
He had thought that in this remote corner of England--this little, old-world fishing town, with its total lack of entertainment, its unfashionable beach, and its wild North Sea breakers--no unit of the great Western race would have set foot. He had believed its entire absence of attraction to be a sure safeguard, and he was unfeignedly disgusted to discover that this was not the case.
As he ate his dinner the high laugh broke in on his meditations again and again, and his annoyance grew to a sense of savage irritation. He had come over to England for a rest after a severe illness, and with an intense craving, after his twenty years of stress and toil, to stand aside and watch the world--the English, conservative world he loved--dawdle by.
He wanted to bury himself in an unknown fishing-town and a.s.sociate with the simple, unflurried fisher-folk alone. It was a dream of his--a dream which he had imagined near its fulfilment when he had arrived in the peaceful little world of Old Silverstrand.
There was a large and fashionable watering-place five miles away. This was New Silverstrand, a town of red brick, self-centred and prosperous.
But he had not thought that its visitors would have overflowed into the old fishing-town. He himself saw no attraction there save the peace of the sh.o.r.e and the turmoil of the sea. He had known and loved the old town in his youth, long before the new one had been built or even thought of. For New Silverstrand was a growth of barely ten years.
In all his wanderings his heart had always turned with a warm thrill of memory to the little old fishing-town where much of his restless boyhood had been spent. He had returned to it as to a familiar friend and found it but slightly changed. A new hotel had been erected where the old Crayfish Inn had once stood. And this, so far as he had been able to judge in his first walk through the place on the evening of his arrival, was the sole alteration.
He had heard that the sh.o.r.e had crumbled beyond the town, but he had left that to be investigated on the morrow. The fishing-harbour was the same; the brown-sailed fishing-boats rocked with the well-remembered swing inside; the water poured roaring in with the same baffled fury; and children played as of old on the extreme and dangerous edge of the stone quay.
The memory of that selfsame quay roused deeper recollections in Merefleet"s mind as he sat and dined alone at the little table near the door.
There came to him the thought, with a sudden, stabbing regret, of a little dark-eyed sister who had hung with him over that perilous edge and laughed at the impotent breakers below. He could hear the silvery echoes of her laughter across half a lifetime, could feel the warm hand that clasped his own. A magic touch swept aside the years and revealed the old, glad days of his boyhood.
Merefleet pushed away his plate and sat with fixed eyes, fascinated by the rosy vision. They were side by side in a fishing-smack, he and the playmate of his childhood. There was an old fisherman in charge with grizzled hair, whose name, he recollected without effort, was Quiller.
He was showing the little maid how to tie a knot that was warranted never to come undone.
Merefleet watched the ardent, flushed face with a deep reverence. He had not seen it so vividly since the day he had kissed it for the last time and gone forth into the seething sea of life to fight the whirlpools.
Well, he had emerged triumphant so far as earthly success went. He had breasted the tide and risen above the billows. He was wealthy, and he was celebrated. No mortal power rose up in his path to baulk him of his desire. Only desire itself had failed him, and ambition had become mockery.
For twenty years he had not had time to stop and think. For twenty years he had wrestled ceaselessly with the panting crowd. He had bartered away the best years of his life to the gold G.o.d, and he was satiated with the success of this transaction.
In all that time he had not mourned, as he mourned to-night, the loss of the twin-sister who had been as his second and better self. He had not realised till he sat alone in the place, where as a boy he had never known solitude, how utterly flat and undesirable was the future that stretched out like a trackless desert at his feet.
And in that moment he would have cast away the whole bulk of his great possessions for one precious day of youth out of the many that had fled away for ever.