Only a girl's love
an icy hand was closing round her heart, and wringing the life blood
out of it.
"For yours. It was not fitting that you should hear from other lips
than mine that from this hour you and I are as far apart as pole from
pole."
She inclined her head.
"So be it. There is no appeal from such a sentence. But may I ask you
to explain; dare I venture so far?" and her lip curled.
"Do you think you dare?" he said, sternly.
She inclined her head, his sternness struck her like a blow.
"You have come to tell me, have you not?" she said. "Where have you
been?"
"I have come from Carlyon," he said.
"From whom?"
"From the girl from whom your base scheming separated me," he said,
sternly.
"Ah," she breathed, but her eyes opened with a wild stare. "You--you
have gone back to her?"
He waved his hand.
"Let there be no word of her between us," he said; "your lips shall not
profane her name."
She turned white and her hand went to her heart.
"Forgive me," he said, hoarsely. Had he not promised to deal gently
with her? "I have not come to utter reproaches--I came to shield you,
if that were possible."
"To shield!--from what?" she demanded, in a low murmur.
"From the consequences of your crime," he said. "What that is, I have
only learnt to-night; but for a chance accident the world would know
to-morrow that Lady Lenore Beauchamp had stooped so low as to become
the accomplice of Jasper Adelstone in a vile conspiracy."
She waved her hand.
"He dare not speak. I defy him!"
Leycester held up his hand.
"He is beyond your defiance," he said--"Jasper Adelstone is dead!"
She made a gesture of contemptuous indifference.
"What is that to me?" she said, hoarsely. "Why do you speak to me of
him or any other man? Is it not enough that I have failed? Have you
come to gloat over me? What is it that you want?"
He thrust his hand in his breast, and drew forth the note.
"I have come to restore this to you," he said. "I took it from the dead
man's bosom--took it to save your reputation. The story it told me I
have heard in fact from the lips of the girl you have plotted against
and wronged. It is at her bidding that I am here--here to save you from
scandal, and to cover if possible your retreat."
"At her's--at Stella Etheridge's?" she breathed, as though the name
would choke her.
He waved his hand.
"You will leave this house to-night. I have made all arrangements
necessary, and you will start in an hour's time."
She laughed discordantly.
"And if I say I will not?"
He looked at her sternly.
"Then I will tell the story to my mother and you shall hear your
dismissal from her lips. Choose!"
She dropped into a chair, and made a gesture of scorn.
"Tell whom you please," she said. "I am your affianced wife, my people
are under your roof at this moment; go to them and tell them that you
have deserted me for a low-born girl!"
He turned and strode to the door; but ere he had reached it the
reaction had come. With a low cry, she flew to him and sank at his
feet, her hands clasped on his arm, her face upturned with an awful
imploration.
"Leycester, Leycester! Do not leave me! Do not go! Leycester, I was
wrong, wicked, base, vile; but it was all for you--for you! Leycester,
listen to me! You will not go! Do not fling me from you! Look at me,
Leycester!"
He did look at her, lovely in her abandon and despair, and then averted
his eyes; it horrified him to see her so low and degraded.
"You will not look at me!" she wailed; "you will not! Oh, Heaven! am
I so changed? am I old, ugly, hideous? Leycester, you have called
me beautiful a hundred--a thousand times; and now you will not look
at me! You will leave me! You shall not; I will hold you like this
forever--forever! Ah!"--for he had made a movement to disengage
himself--"you will not hurt me! Yes; kill me, kill me here at your
feet! I would rather die so than live without you. I cannot, Leycester!
Listen, I love you; I love you twenty thousand times better than that
wretched girl can do! Leycester, I will give my life for you! See, I am
kneeling here at your feet! You will not spurn me, you cannot repel me!
Leycester! oh, my darling, my love! do what you will with me, but do
not spurn me! Oh, my love, my love!"
It was piteous, it was awful, to see and hear her, and the strong man
trembled and turned pale, but his heart was stone and ice toward her;
the white, wan face of his darling came between them, and made the
flushed, passion-distorted face at his feet seem hideous and repellant.
"Rise!" he said, sternly.
"No, no; I will not," she moaned. "I will die at your feet! Leycester,
you will kill me! I have lost all for your sake, pride and honor, and
now my fair name, for you cannot shield me; and you will thrust me
aside. Leycester, you cannot! you cannot! Oh, my love, my love, do not
spurn me from you!" and still on her knees, she bent her head upon his
arm, and poured a storm of passionate, broken kisses upon his hand.
That roused him. With an exclamation of abhorrence, he threw her grasp
off, and stood with his hand on the door.
She sprang to her feet, and, white and breathless, looked at him as if
she would read his soul; then throwing her hands above her head, she
fell to the ground.
He stood for a moment or two bending over her, thinking her senseless,
but it was simply mental and physical exhaustion, and when he strode to
the bell, she opened her eyes and held up her hand to stop him.
"No," she murmured. "Let no one see me. Go now. Go!"
He went to the door, and she rose and supported herself against a chair.
"Good-bye, Leycester," she said. "I have lost you--and all! All!"
It was the last words he heard her utter for many and many a year.
CHAPTER XLII.
"After all, there is nothing like English scenery; this is very
beautiful. I don't suppose you could get a greater variety of opal
tints in one view than lies before us now, but there is something
missing. It is all too beautiful, too rich, too gorgeous; one finds
one's breath coming too quickly, and one longs for just a dash of
English gloom to tone down the brilliant colors and give a relief."
It was Mr. Etheridge who spoke. He was standing beside a low rustic
seat which fronted the world-famous view from the Piazza at Nice. The
sun was dropping into the horizon like a huge ball of crimson fire,
the opal tints of the sky stretched far above their heads and even
behind them. It was one blaze of glory in which a slim, girlish figure,
leaning far back in the seat, seemed bathed.
She was pale still, was this Stella, this little girl heroine of
ours, but the dark look of trouble and leaden sorrow had gone, and
the light of youth and youthful joy had come back to the dark eyes;
the faint, ever ready smile hovered again about the red, mobile lips.
"Sorrow" says Goethe, "is the refining touch to a woman's beauty,"
and it refined Stella's. She was lovely now, with that soft, ethereal
loveliness which poets sing of, and artists paint, and we poor penman
so vainly strive to describe.
She looked up with a smile.
"Homesick, uncle?" she murmurs.
The old man strokes his beard, and glances at her.
"I plead guilty," he says. "You cannot make a hermit crab happy if you
take him out of his shell, and the cottage is my shell, Stella."
She sighed softly, not with unhappiness, but with that tender
reflectiveness which women alone possess.
"I will go back when you please, dear," she says.
"Hem!" he grunts. "There is someone else to consult, mademoiselle;
that someone else seems particularly satisfied to remain where we are;
but then I suppose he would be contented to remain anywhere so that a
certain pale-faced, insignificant chit of a girl were near him."
A faint blush, a happy flush spreads over the pale face, and the long
lashes droop over the dark eyes.
"At any rate we must ask him," says the old man; "we owe him that
little attention at least, seeing how much long-suffering patience he
has and continues to display."
"Don't, uncle," murmurs the half-parted lips.
"It is all very well to say 'don't,'" retorts the old man with a grim
smile. "Seriously, don't you think that you are, to use an Americanism,
playing it rather low down on the poor fellow?"
"I--I--don't know what you mean," she falters.
"Permit me to explain then," he says, ironically.
"I--I don't want to hear, dear."
"It is fitting that girls should be made to hear sometimes," he
says, with a smile. "What I mean is simply this, that, as a man with
something approaching a conscience and a fellow feeling for my kind, I
feel it my duty to point out to you that, perhaps unconsciously, you
are leading Leycester the sort of life that the bear who dances on hot
bricks--if any bear ever does--is supposed to lead. Here for months,
after no end of suffering----"
"I have suffered too," she murmurs.
"Exactly," he assents, in his gently-grim way; "but that only makes
it worse. After months of suffering, you allow him to dangle at
your heels, you drag him at your chariot wheels, tied him at your
apron strings from France to Italy, from Italy to Switzerland, from
Switzerland back to France again, and gave him no more encouragement
than a cat does a dog."
The faint flush is a burning crimson now.
"He--he need not come," she murmurs, panting. "He is not obliged."
"The moth--the infuriated moth, is not obliged to hover about the
candle, but he does hover, and generally winds up by scorching his
wings. I admit that it is foolish and unreasonable, but it is none the
less true that Leycester is simply incapable, apparently, of resting
outside the radius of your presence, and therefore I say hadn't you
better give him the right to remain within that radius and----"
She put up her hand to stop him, her face a deeper crimson still.
"Permit me," he says, obstinately, and puffing at his pipe to
emphasize. "Once more the unfortunate wretch is on tenterhooks; he is
dying to take possession of you, and afraid to speak up like a man
because, possibly, you have had a little illness----"
"Oh, uncle, and you said yourself that you thought I should have died."
He coughs.
"Ahem! One is inclined to exaggerate sometimes. He is afraid to speak
because in his utter sensitiveness he will insist upon considering you
an invalid still, whereas you are about as strong and healthy now as,
to use another Americanism, 'they make 'em.' Now, Stella, if you mean
to marry him, say so; if you don't mean to, say so, and for goodness
sake let the unfortunate monomaniac go."
"Leycester is not a monomaniac, uncle," she retorts, in a low,
indignant voice.
"Yes, he is," he says, "he is possessed by a mania for a little chit
of a girl with a pale face and dark eyes and a nose that is nothing to
speak of. If he wasn't an utterly lost maniac he would have refused
to dangle at your heels any longer, and gone off to someone with some
pretension to a regular facial outline." He stops, for there comes the
sound of a firm, manly tread upon the smooth gravel path, and the next
instant Leycester's tall figure is beside them.
He bends over the slight, slim, graceful figure, a loving, reverential
devotion in his handsome face, a faint anxiety in his eyes and in his
voice as he says, in that low, musical undertone which has charmed so
many women's ears:
"Have you no wrap on, Stella? These evenings are very beautiful but
treacherous."
"There isn't a breath of air," says Stella, with a little laugh.
"Yes, yes!" he says, and puts his hand on the arm that rests on the
seat, "you must be careful, indeed you must, my darling, I will go and
get you a----"
"Blanket and a suit of sables," broke in the old man, with good
humorous banter. "Allow me, I am young and full of energy, and you are