We now turn to a very different scene and locality—to Regent Street, still deemed the architectural chef d'œuvre of the celebrated Mr. Nash, though it is all mere brick and plaster.
The London season was past and over, but one would hardly have thought so, as the broad pavements seemed still so crowded, and so many vehicles of every kind were passing in close lines along the thoroughfare from Waterloo Place to the Langham Hotel.
It was a bright sunny forenoon, and as Vivian Hammersley, now a convalescent, and in accurate morning mufti, looked on the well-dressed throng, the shops filled with everything the mind could desire or the world produce, and at the entire aspect of the well-swept street, he thought, after his recent experience of forest and donga, of rocky mountain and pathless karoo, that there was nothing like it in Europe for an idler—that it surpassed alike the Broadway of Uncle Sam and the Grand Boulevard of Paris.
Enjoying the situation and his surroundings to the fullest extent, he was walking slowly down towards where the colonnades stood of old, when suddenly he experienced something between an electric shock and a cold douche.
Both well mounted, a handsome fellow attired in excellent taste, with a tea rose and a green sprig in his lapel, and a graceful girl in a well-fitting dark blue habit, a dainty hat and short veil, ambled slowly past him—so slowly that he could observe them well—and in the latter he recognised Finella!
Finella Melfort, mounted on her favourite pad Fern; but who was this with whom she seemed on such easy and laughing terms, and with whom she was riding through the streets of London, without even the escort of a groom?
Erelong quickening their pace to a trot, they turned westward along Conduit Street, as if intending to 'do a bit of Park,' and he lost sight of them.
Her companion was one whom Hammersley had never seen before, but he could remark that he had all the manner and appearance of a man of good birth; but there was even something more than that in his bearing—an undefinable and indescribable air of interest seemed to hover about them, and Hammersley thought he might prove a very formidable rival. But surely matters had not come to that!
To letters that he had addressed to Finella at Craigengowan, under cover to 'Miss Carlyon,' no answer had ever been returned. He knew not that Dulcie was no longer there, and that the letters referred to had gone back to the Post Office. And so Finella's silence—was it indifference—seemed unpleasantly accounted for now.
He knew not her address in London. The house of the Fettercairn family was shut up, and he could not accost her while escorted by 'that fellow,' as she seemed ever to be, for on two occasions he saw them again in the Row; nor could he prosecute any inquiries, as most of the mutual friends at whose dances and garden parties he had been wont to meet her in the past times were now out of town.
It was tantalizing—exasperating!
Did she suppose he had been killed, and had already forgotten him? Did her heart shrink from a vacuum, or what? Thus pride soon supplemented jealousy.
A few days after the third occasion on which he had seen them, he was idling in the reading-room of 'The Rag'—as the Army and Navy Club is colloquially known, from a joke in Punch, and the smoking-room of which has the reputation of being the best in London; and few, perhaps none, of those who lounge therein are aware that the stately edifice occupies what was the site till 1790 of Nell Gwynne's house in Pall Mall.
'How goes it, Hammersley?' said Villiers, the aide-de-camp, who was also home on leave, and en route to join his regiment, being yet—as he grumblingly said—out of 'the Wolseley ring.' 'Has no Belgravian belle succeeded in capturing you yet—a hero, like myself, fresh from the assegais of Ulundi and all that sort of thing?'
'No—I am still at large; but you forget that by the time I reached town the season was over.'
'Talking of belles,' said an officer who was lounging in a window, 'here comes one worth looking at.'
Finella and her cavalier, mounted again, were quietly rambling into the square from Pall Mall.
'Ah—she is with Garallan of the Bengal Cavalry,' said Villiers; 'he has come in for a good thing—has picked up an heiress, I hear.'
'About the most useful thing a fellow can pick up nowadays,' replied a tall officer named Gore.
'That girl is said to be always ahead of the London season.'
'How?'
'Dresses direct from Paris.'
'Garallan?' said Hammersley, turning from the window, as the pair had disappeared.
'A Major of the old Second Irregular Cavalry, and gained the V.C. when serving on the Staff at the storming of Jummoo.'
'Jummoo—where the devil is that?' asked one.
'On the Peshawur frontier,' replied another; 'he is now in luck's way, certainly.'
'They say,' resumed Villiers in his laughing off-hand way, and who really knew nothing of Finella, but was merely ventilating some club gossip, to the intense annoyance of Hammersley; 'they say that she is a coquette from her finger-tips to her tiny balmorals, and would flirt with his Grace of Canterbury if she got a chance; and yet, with all that, she can be most sentimental. There is Gore of ours—a passed practitioner in the art of philandering——'
'Villiers, please to shut up,' said Hammersley impatiently in a sotto voce; 'I know the young lady, and you don't.'
'The deuce you do?'
'Intimately.'
Villiers coloured, and lapsed into silence.
'I always look upon flirtation as playing with fire,' said Gore; 'never attempt it, but I get into some deuced scrape.'
'How much money is muddled up with matrimony in the world nowadays!' said Villiers, thinking probably of the heiress's thousands; 'I suppose it was different in the days of our grandfathers.'
'Not much, I fancy,' said Gore.
Hammersley had now occasion for much and somewhat bitter thought. Finella and this officer were evidently the subjects of club gossip and not very well-bred banter; the conviction galled him.
'Where the deuce or with whom does she reside?' he thought; 'but to find anyone you want, I don't know a more difficult place than this big village on Thames.'
The wrong person—like himself apparently—turning up at the wrong time is no new experience to anyone; but this intimacy of Finella and her cavalier seemed to be a daily matter, as Hammersley had seen them so often; and how often were they too probably together on occasions that he could know nothing of?
The germ of jealousy was now planted in his heart, and 'such germs by force of circumstances sometimes flourish and bear bitter fruit; at others, nothing assisting, they perish in the mind that gave them birth;' but a new force was given to the remarks of Villiers by some that Hammersley overheard the same evening in the same place—the 'Rag.'
There he suddenly recognised Finella's cavalier in full evening costume, eating his dinner alone in a corner of the great dining-room, and all unaware that he was sternly and closely scrutinized by one man, and the subject of conversation for other two, whose somewhat flippant remarks from behind a newspaper reached the ears of the former.
'Who is he, do you say? His face is new to me.'
'Ronald Garallan, of the Bengal Cavalry—a lucky dog.'
'How so?'
'Is going in for a good thing, I hear.'
'For what?'
'His cousin with no end of tin.'
'His cousin?' questioned the other and Hammersley's heart at the same time.
'Yes—the handsome Miss Melfort with the funny name—Finella Melfort.'
'So they are engaged?'
'I believe so; but I don't think from all I hear that the Major has much of a vocation for domesticity.'
'Even with Finella?'
'Even with Finella,' replied the other, laughing.
Hammersley felt a dark frown gather on his brow to hear her Christian name—his property as he deemed it—used in this off-hand fashion, and he felt a violent inclination to punch his brother-officer's head. However, he only moved his chair away from the vicinity of the speakers, but not before he heard one of them say to Garallan:
'Been to many dances since your return? England, you know, expects every marriageable bachelor to do his duty.'
'The season is over,' replied the Major curtly; and then added, 'you forget that I am on leave—the sick list, with a Medical Board before me yet.'
'What a bore! But you are bound for some festive scene to-night, I presume?'
'Only to the Lyceum.'
'The Lyceum—with her perhaps,' thought Hammersley; and to see the affair out to the bitter end, he resolved to go there too.
He was cut to the heart again, and bit his nether lip to preserve his self-control. He had never heard of this cousin, Ronald Garallan; he certainly found his name in the Army List, but did not believe he was any cousin at all; and this only served to make matters look more and more black.
Hammersley in his natural pride of spirit rather revolted at going to the theatre, feeling as if he was acting somewhat like a spy, but he had a right to learn for himself what was on the tapis with regard to Finella; and the Lyceum was as free a theatre to him as to anyone else; so a few minutes after saw him bowling along the Strand in a hansom cab.
He got a seat on the grand tier, but with difficulty, and, fortunately for his purpose, a little back and well out of sight; and, oblivious of the stage and all the usual scenic splendours there, he swept 'the house' again and again, with the same powerful field-glass he had so lately used on many a scouting expedition, but in vain, till the crimson satin curtain of a private box was suddenly drawn back, and Finella in a perfect costume, yet not quite full dress, sat there like a little queen, with many a sparkling jewel, and Garallan half leaning on the back of her chair, as she consulted the programme, after depositing a beautiful bouquet and her opera-glass on the front of the box before her.
Hammersley's heart seemed to give a leap, and then stood still, while he actually felt an ache in the bullet wound which had so nearly cost him his life.
There they were, in a private box together, and without a chaperone, which certainly looked like cousinship, though every way distasteful to Hammersley; and Garallan leant over her chair, ignoring the performance entirely, and evidently entertaining her in 'that original and delicious strain in which Adam and Eve were probably the first proficients.'
And Finella was smiling upwards at times with her radiant eyes and riant face, with the bright and happy expression of one who had nothing left to wish for in the world; while he—Vivian Hammersley—might be, for all she knew or seemed to care, lying unburied by the banks of the Umvolosi or the Lower Tugela!
He recalled the words of her letter, so long and so loving, which he received so unexpectedly in Zululand, in which she urged him to be brave of heart for her sake, and not to be discouraged by any opposition on the part of Lady Fettercairn, as she was rich enough to please herself, adding:
'Let us have perfect confidence in each other! Oh, you passionate silly! to run away in a rage as you did without seeking an explanation. How much it has cost me Heaven alone knows!'
'Now,' thought he, 'suppose all the explanation she gave Miss Carlyon at Craigengowan of that remarkable scene in the shrubbery, or that she was lured into a scrape with that cub Shafto, were mere humbug after all. It looks deuced like it from what I see going on here in London. And then the rings I gave her—one a marriage hoop to keep—an unlucky gift—ha! ha! what a precious ass I have been!'
Vivian Hammersley, though a tough-looking and well set-up linesman, was of an imaginative cast, and of a highly sensitive nature, and such are usually well skilled in the art of elaborate self-torture.
He now perceived that for a moment she had drawn the glove from off her left hand—what a lovely little white hand it was! He turned his powerful field-glass thereon, with more interest and curiosity than he had done while watching for Zulu warriors, and there—yes—there by Jove!—his heart gave a bound—was his engagement ring upon her engaged finger still—there was no doubt about that!
So what did all this too apparent philandering with another mean, if not the most arrant coquetry? Had her character changed within a few short months? It almost seemed so.
But Hammersley thought that, 'tide what may,' he had seen enough of the Lyceum for that night, and hurried away to the smoking-room of the 'Rag.’