ON that same evening in London it was announced to Countess Alexia that a Mr. Maxton was in the morning-room waiting to see her on urgent business. Her brother was not at home, being away at a diplomatic function. Alexia had dined alone and was now busy answering a batch of letters of congratulation which the news of her approaching marriage had brought. She sent down a request to know on what business so late a visitor wished to see her, and word was brought back that it concerned Mr. Herriard and was most urgent. Not satisfied with that reply and beginning to be vaguely suspicious, Alexia sent to say that she was busy and would be glad if Mr. Maxton would give her in writing a more definite idea of what he wished to say. In a few minutes the suggested note was handed to her. She opened it with some apprehension. It consisted of but two lines. “Mr. Herriard has met with a serious accident at Bradbury.”
Fighting against the faintness that came over her as she realized instantly that the news might be but half told, she said she would see the visitor, and, after a few moments of sickening fear, nerving herself bravely to hear the worst, she went down to the room where the messenger of evil waited.
As she entered, the man was standing with his back to the door, scrutinizing a picture. It was not till Alexia had come some way into the room that he turned, and with a thrill more of disgust than fear she recognized him.
“Mr. Gastineau!”
He smiled and took a step towards her, holding out his hand. “Paul Gastineau, Countess, risen from the dead.”
She ignored his outstretched hand, affecting to look at his note which she held. “You have come to tell me of Mr. Herriard?” she said, hoping now that the message might have been but a trick to induce her to see him. “He has met with an accident?” she asked, with a touch of incredulity.
Gastineau gave a little sympathetic shrug. “Poor Geoffrey! Yes, I’m afraid he has had a bad experience. I have had a telegram—you know we have of late been great chums, if not more—a telegram to say the meeting was broken up and Herriard hurt. I thought I could do no less than come round to tell you.”
Looking at him steadily, she told herself that he was lying. “You need not have brought the message yourself; you might have sent it,” she observed coldly.
He was evidently stung by her tone, for he returned, with a touch of feeling, “In view of the relations which I understand exist between you and Herriard I should scarcely have cared to give you what may prove to be very serious news in an off-hand fashion. I regret that my well-meant errand has met with so ungracious a reception.”
“I am sorry to hear that Mr. Herriard has been hurt,” Alexia said stiffly. “Is that all?”
“Is it not enough?”
“Quite. I mean, I will not detain you longer.”
“One would think, Countess,” he said quietly, watching her with probing eyes, “that you were glad, rather than sorry, to hear the bad news.”
“You can hardly expect me to discuss with you my feelings on the subject,” she returned, with a significant move towards the bell.
He made a swift step forward and intercepted her. “Alexia—Countess,” he said, with a note of passion in his voice, “is this my welcome back to life?”
“What other,” she asked, coldly as ever, and with a self-possession that hid her knowledge of how critical the interview must be, “could you expect from me?”
“I had hoped,” he answered simply, “for one of a very different kind.” Then his manner changed abruptly with a bitter exclamation. “Welcome! As though I had not atoned by years of hopeless agony for all the sins of my past! Alexia!” He tried to take her hand: she drew it away with a movement of avoidance.
“No,” she said peremptorily; “I forbid you to speak to me like that.”
He bowed his head in submission and so hid the baulked devil that shot a blaze into his eyes. “I come back to life and the world to find you as beautiful, as cold, as cruel as ever,” he murmured, with schooled humility.
“I cannot listen to you any longer,” Alexia said. “Please go.”
He was facing her now with a look of fight in his eyes. “My message to you,” he protested with quiet insistence, “was two-fold. I warn you, for your own sake and Geoffrey Herriard’s, not to dismiss me till you have heard the second part.”
She gave a slight sigh of impatience. “If I must listen to you——” And yet she felt that in her mind there was no alternative.
“More depends upon it than you imagine,” he replied coolly. “You shall not be kept long; I, too, am busy.”
He placed a chair for her, and, with an annoying consciousness of submission, she sat down. A sense of her old fear and dislike of the man was creeping over her, and, giving her greater uneasiness still, the subduing sense of his dominant will. It was fortunate, she thought, that she had to act only on the defensive. Still, it might afford a chance of divining the enemy’s tactics.
“I had,” he began, as he stood before her in the manifest consciousness of power in will and brain, “to come in here under a false name; not merely because I doubted your receiving me, but because Paul Gastineau is to the world still dead, at least for some time longer. So much for myself; I do not want you, of all women, to think of me as a trickster. Now, to the point of my errand. You are going—you must make allowances for my bluntness, time presses and I am a fighting man rather than a diplomatist,—you are going to marry Geoffrey Herriard, very soon; but sooner or later is immaterial. I have come,—forgive me,—to tell you that you must not marry him.”
“Why not?” The question was put quietly. Alexia was surprised at her own self-possession.
Gastineau’s eyes seemed to burn upon her now. “Because,” he answered steadily, “he has stolen, or, at least, appropriated you from me.”
“No, no,” she protested, meeting his gaze defiantly. “That is absurd. You have no right to say that.”
“Then,” he rejoined, with his cunning smile, “because I love you.”
“Oh!” Alexia rose with an exclamation of annoyance. “Mr. Gastineau, is that persecution to begin again?”
His face was set with the suggestion of purpose. “There will be no persecution on my part,” he replied darkly. “I trust we are respectively too sensible to practise or to court it. All I am here for now is to enlighten you, the woman I love with all my soul and strength, as to the true position in which you stand, in a word, to prevent your taking the shadow for the substance.”
“I think I understand you,” she returned, with a disdainful coldness which made him rage inwardly, “and can save you the trouble of inflicting upon me a repetition of a story which I have already heard.”
“Ah!” He seemed nettled at his forestalling. “So the famous Geoffrey Herriard has been clever enough to see the desirability of making a clean breast of his position before he was found out, and has confessed that his cleverness has been borrowed—like his career—from another man’s brains, eh? He has told you?”
“Everything.”
Gastineau’s face relaxed into a sneering smile. “I am sorry to hear that, since it means that he has broken his word of honour, a solemn promise made to me to whom he owes everything.”
“I should think,” Alexia said quietly, “his course was justified.”
He glanced at her sharply, and saw through her words that she knew all. “No doubt,” he rejoined, “he would try to justify it, but we need scarcely stay to argue that point. What I ask you to realize is the fact that you are rejecting the real man in favour of his empty mask.”
“I do not accept your estimate of Mr. Herriard,” she replied curtly.
He seemed charged with the magnetism of a supreme, coercive will, yet her coldness always held him at bay. He could scarcely hope to argue successfully against that baffling attitude of dislike.
“I wish,” he continued, schooling his face and manner to an insinuating humility, “that you would try to find it in your heart to entertain a more favourable estimate of me. Alexia,” he went on passionately, tactfully taking no more than a step forward as he saw her shrink from his advance, “let me call you once by that name, if it is the last time; Alexia, why can you not love me? What, in Heaven’s name, is the curse upon me that gives hate in return where I have beggared myself for love? Alexia,” he urged, with a passion that now was genuine enough, “tell me, as one human soul speaking to another, what there is in me that repels you, you of all women, the last in the world whom I could have imagined rejecting substance for shadow. Tell me, even though it be to my utter despair, tell me the truth, why do you so hate me?”
He was bending forward, his face working, his eyes avidly pleading, his body quivering betwixt infinite desire and intense restraint. Before him Alexia stood like one at bay before a crouching tiger, desperate yet unflinching. Perhaps had she not added the indication of courage to beauty it might have lessened the deadliness of the attack. As it was, she could meet his eyes and answer steadily:
“I never hated you till you began to persecute me——”
“Persecute!” he interrupted her impatiently, almost with temper. “Cannot a man declare his love and do all in his power to get it returned without being called a persecutor?”
“It is at least unchivalrous,” she replied, “to try to compel a woman’s love. In the old days I could have had none for you. Now it is more than ever impossible.”
His face lowered. “Since Herriard appeared on the scene,” he said through his teeth. “Herriard, who is my creature, the puppet of my whim, the marionette that, lying on my sick couch, I made to dance to my fancy, and have ended, to my sorrow, by galvanizing into my rival.”
He spoke with an intensity of bitterness that seemed to strip naked his jealous, malignant soul. But Alexia appeared to take little heed of the stinging words. “Mr. Herriard,” she said coolly, “has little or nothing to do with my feeling towards you.”
“No? Then we brush the lay figure aside out of our consideration.” He accompanied the words with a contemptuous sweep of the arm. “At least,” he continued, “I am glad you realize that a mere speaking puppet has no right to stand between intellects like yours and mine. Now, tell me, what have I done to stand worse with you now than in the old days?”
“You have slandered me, Mr. Gastineau,” she answered steadily.
He made a gesture of making light of a charge not worth denying. “To the doll, to the child, to keep him from meddling with what was meant for his betters, as we keep a baby’s hands off a valuable ornament by saying it will bite him. Surely my presence here, the words I have spoken to you, give the lie to the idea that I could ever believe ill of you.”
“To my mind,” she retorted, “your slander, of all men’s, gives the lie to what you have forced me to listen to to-night.”
A curious change swept over his face. He had realized, even before she did, the half-thought that was suggested by and lay behind her words.
“You are quite right,” he returned, with a strange calming of the passion that had seemed to rage within him. “Your reproach had more justice in it than you, possibly, imagine. I should have been the last man to accuse you even by innuendo. But I was desperate, a cripple, helpless and, at that time, hopeless. My love made me mad with jealousy, and it is the curse of jealousy that it can be cruel even to the thing it loves. To think that a feather of my own disabled wing had plumed the shaft that had struck my heart—yes, Alexia, I must have been mad, or I could never have breathed a suggestion against the woman whom I love beyond the power of all words to tell.”
“And whose offence, whose provocation in your eyes are that she can never return the feeling,” she said with quiet firmness.
He bowed his head, strangely submissive. “I do not despair,” he replied, in a low voice. “I cannot. Despair would mean death, and life is strong within me; only less strong than my love. That I have laid at your feet, only to be accepted with hate and distrust. I will prove my sincerity. I will put the other, my life, into your keeping. Then you will have all I have, since, with my love, my very soul and spirit are yours. Alexia, I give my life into your hands.”
He paused; and the silence lasted till she was forced to ask, with a suggestion of incredulity, “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” he answered deliberately, “that I am going to prove the sincerity of my love for you by entrusting you with a secret on which my life may depend. You must believe in me, when I confide to you alone of all the world that Captain Martindale met his death at my hand.”