Only a girl's love
resist me!" and the dark, tender eyes beside them seemed to turn upon
him with gentle, passionate pleading, praying him to be constant and
faithful.
"Lenore!" he said, in a low voice. "Mother, ought you to have said
this?"
She did not shrink from his almost reproachful gaze.
"Why should I hesitate when my son's happiness is at stake?" she said,
calmly. "If I saw a treasure, some pearl of great price, lying at your
feet, and felt that you were passing it by unnoticed and disregarded,
should I be wrong in speaking the word that would place it in your
grasp? Your happiness is my--life Leycester! If ever there was a
treasure, a pearl of great price among women, it is Lenore. Are you
passing her by? You will not do that!"
Never, since he could remember, had he seen her so moved. Her voice
was calm and even, as usual, but her eyes were warm with an intense
earnestness, the diamonds trembled on her neck.
He stood before her, looking away beyond her, a strange trouble at his
heart. For the first time he saw--he appreciated, rather--the beautiful
girl whom, as it were, she held up to his mental gaze. But that
other, that girl-love whose lips still seemed to murmur, "I love you,
Leycester!" What of her!
With a sudden start he moved away.
"I do not think you should have spoken," he said. "You cannot know----"
The countess smiled.
"A mother's eyes are quick," she said. "A word and the pearl is at your
feet, Leycester."
He was but a man, warm-blooded and impressionable, and for a moment his
face flushed, but the "I love you" still rang in his ears.
"If that be so, all the more cause for silence, mother," he said. "But
I hope you are mistaken."
"I am not mistaken," she said. "Do you think," and she smiled, "that
I should have spoken if I had not been sure? Oh, Leycester," and she
moved toward him, "think of her! Is there any beauty so beautiful as
hers; is there any one woman you have ever met who possessed a tithe of
her charms! Think of her as the head of the house; think of her in my
place----"
He put up his hand.
"Think of her," she went on, quickly, "as your own, your very own!
Leycester, there is no man born who could turn away from her!"
Almost involuntarily he turned and went to the fireplace, and leant
upon it.
"There is no man, who, so turning, but would in time give all that he
possessed to come back to her!"
Then her voice changed.
"Leycester, you have been very good. Are you angry?"
"No," he said, and he went to her; "not angry, but--but troubled. You
think only of me, but I think of Lenore."
"Think of her still!" she said; "and be sure that I have made no
mistake. If you doubt me, put it to the test----"
He started.
"And you will find that I am right. I am going now, Leycester.
Good-night!" and she kissed him.
He went to the door and opened it; his face was pale and grave.
"Good-night," he said, gently. "You have given me something to think of
with a vengeance," and he forced a smile.
She went out without a word. Her maid was waiting for her in her
dressing-room, but she passed into the inner room and sank down in a
chair, and for the first time her face was pale, and her eyes anxious.
"It has gone further than I thought," she murmured. "I, who know every
look in his eyes, read his secret. But it shall not be. I will save him
yet. But how? but how?"
Poor Stella!
Lord Leicester, left alone, fell to pacing the room, his brow bent, his
mind in a turmoil.
He loved his mother with a passionate devotion, part and parcel of
his nature. Every word she had said had sunk into his mind; he loved
her, and he knew her; he knew that she would rather die than give her
consent to his marriage with such an one as Stella, pure and good and
sweet though she was.
He was greatly troubled, but he stood firm.
"Come what will," he murmured, "I cannot part with her. _She_ is my
treasure and pearl of great price, and I have not passed her by. My
darling!"
Suddenly, breaking into his reverie, came a knock at the door.
He went to open it but it opened before he could reach it, and Lord
Charles walked in.
There was a smile on his handsome, light-hearted face, which barely hid
an expression of affectionate sympathy.
"Anything the matter, old man?" he said, closing the door.
"Yes--no--not much--why?" said Leycester, forcing a smile.
"Why!" echoed Lord Charles, thrusting his hands into the huge pockets
of his dressing-gown, and eying him with mock reproach. "Can you ask
when you remember that my room is exactly underneath yours, and that it
sounds as if you had turned this into the den of a traveling menagerie?
What are you wearing the carpet out for, Ley?" and he sat down and
looked up at the troubled face with that frank sincerity which invites
confidence.
"I'm in a fix," said Leycester.
"Come on," said Lord Charles, curtly.
"I can't. You can't help me in this," said Leycester, with a sigh.
Lord Charles rose at once.
"Then I'll go. I wish I could. What have you been doing,
Ley?--something to-night, I expect. Never mind; if I can help you,
you'll let me know."
Leycester threw him a cigar-case.
"Sit down and smoke, Charlie," he said. "I can't open my mind, but I
want to think, and you'll help me. Is it late?"
"Awfully," said Lord Charles with a yawn. "What a jolly evening it has
been. I say, Ley, haven't you been carrying it on rather thick with
that pretty girl with the dark eyes?"
Leycester paused in his task of lighting a cigar, and looked down at
him.
"Which girl?" he said, with a little touch of hauteur in his face.
"The painter's niece," said Lord Charles. "What a beautiful girl she
is! Reminds me of a what-do-you-call-it."
"What is that?"
"A--a gazelle. It's rather a pity that she should be intended for that
saucy lawyer fellow."
"What?" asked Lord Leycester, quietly.
"Haven't you heard?" said Lord Charles, grimly. "The fellows were
talking about it in the billiard-room."
"About what?" demanded Lord Leycester, still quietly, though his
eyes glittered. Stella the common talk of the billiard-room. It was
desecration.
"Oh, it was Longford, he knows the man!"
"What man?"
"This Jasper Adelstone she is engaged to."
Lord Leycester held the cigar to his lips, and his teeth closed over it
with a sudden fierce passion.
Coming upon all that had passed, this was the last straw.
"It's a lie!" he said.
Lord Charles looked up with a start, then his face grew grave.
"Perhaps so," he said; "but, after all, it can't matter to you, Ley."
Lord Leycester turned away in silence.
CHAPTER XVI.
Jasper Adelstone was in love.
It was some time before he would bring himself to admit it even to
himself, for he was wont to pride himself on his superiority to all
attacks of the tender passion.
Often and often had he amused himself and his chosen companions by
ridiculing the conditions of those weak mortals who allowed themselves
to be carried away by what he termed a weak and contemptible affection
for the other sex.
Marriage, he used to say, was entirely a matter of business. A man
didn't marry until he was obliged, and then only did so to better
himself. As to love, and that kind of thing--well, it was an exploded
idea--a myth which had died out; at any rate, too absurd a thing
altogether for a man possessed of common sense--for such a man, for
instance, as Jasper Adelstone. He had seen plenty of pretty women and
was received by them with anything but disfavor. He was good-looking,
almost handsome, and would have been that if he could have got rid
of the sharp, cunning glint of his small eyes; and he was clever and
accomplished. He was just the man, it would have been supposed, to
fall a victim to the tender passion; but he had stuck fast by his
principles, and gone stealthily along the road to success, with his
cold smile ready for everyone in general, and not a warm beam in his
heart for anyone in particular.
And now! Yes, he was in love--in love as deeply, unreasoningly, as
impulsively as the veriest school-boy.
This was very annoying! It would have been very annoying if the object
of his passion had been an heiress or the lady of title whom he had in
his inmost mind determined to marry, if he married at all; for he would
have preferred to have attained to his ambition without any awkward and
inconvenient love-making.
But the girl who had inspired him with this sudden and unreasoning
passion was, much to his disgust, neither an heiress nor an offshoot of
nobility.
She was a mere nobody--the niece of an obscure painter! She was not
even in society!
There was no good to be got by marrying her, none whatever. She could
not help him a single step on his ambitious path through life. On the
first evening of his meeting with Stella, when the beauty, and, more
than her beauty, the nameless charm of her bright, pure freshness,
overwhelmed and startled him, he took himself to task very seriously.
"Jasper," he said, "you won't go and make a fool of yourself, I hope!
She is entirely out of your line. She is only a pretty girl; you've
seen a score, a hundred as pretty, or prettier; and she's a mere
nobody! Oh, no, you won't make a fool of yourself--you'll go back to
town to-morrow morning."
But he did not go back to town; instead, he went into the conservatory
at the Rectory, and made up a bouquet and took it to the cottage, and
sank deeper still into the mire of foolishness, as he would have called
it.
But even then it was not too late. He might have escaped even then
by dint of calling up his selfish nature and thinking of all his
ambitions; but Stella unfortunately roused--what was more powerful in
him than his sudden love--his self-conceit.
She actually dared to defend Lord Leycester Wyndward!
That was almost the finishing stroke, unwittingly dealt by Stella, and
he went away inwardly raging with incipient jealousy.
But the last straw was yet to come that should break the back of all
his prudent resolves, and that was the meeting with Stella and Lord
Leycester in the river-woods, and Lord Leycester's attack on him.
That moment--the moment when he lay on the ground looking up at
the dark, handsome, angry, and somewhat scornful face of the young
peer--Jasper Adelstone registered a vow.
He vowed that come what would, by fair means or foul, he would have
Stella.
He vowed that he would snatch her from the haughty and fiery young lord
who had dared to hurl him, Jasper, to the dust and insult him.
What love he already possessed for her suddenly sprang up into a
fierce flame of jealous passion, and as he rode home to the Rectory he
repeated that vow several times, and at once, without the loss of an
hour, began to hunt about for some means to fulfill it.
He was no fool, this Jasper Adelstone, for all his conceit, and he knew
the immense odds against him if Lord Leycester really meant anything
by his attention to Stella; he knew what fearful advantages Leycester
held--all the Court cards were in his hands. He was handsome, renowned,
noble, wealthy--a suitor whom the highest in the land would think twice
about before refusing.
He almost guessed, too, that Stella already loved Leycester; he had
seen her face turned to the young lord--had heard her voice as she
spoke to him.
He ground his teeth together with vicious rage as he thought of the
difference between her way of speaking to him and to Leycester.
"But she shall speak to me, look at me like that before the game is
over," he swore to himself. "I can afford to wait for my opportunity;
it will come, and I shall know how to use it. Curse him! Yes, I am
determined now. I will take him from her."
It was a bold, audacious resolution; but then Jasper was both bold