THE moment she saw who had come into the conservatory the marchioness sat down again promptly, and with a decision which spoke volumes for her intention to remain.
Hammond advanced, and recognized the marchioness with a look of wonder.
“Where is Mauleverer?” he inquired.
“I sent Gerald away,” replied the marchioness, with an intonation which plainly added: “And I should like to send you away, too.”
“That was considerate of you,” retorted Hammond, with a pleasant smile.
There was a vacant space on the seat between the two women, and he took possession of it with a cool deliberateness which appeared to cause the marchioness some dismay.
“I wanted to have a little private chat with Miss Yorke,” she observed, stiffly.
“The very thing I wanted, too. You have done me out of my turn, hasn’t she, Miss Yorke? You are positively quite a cuckoo, my dear marchioness.”
The marchioness made a painful effort to smile.
“I am not at all sure that I shall allow you to speak to Miss Yorke,” she responded, trying to look past him at Belle herself.
On Hammond’s entrance Belle had shrunk back with a certain apprehension which had afforded secret satisfaction to her hostess. She now waited in silence, nervously plucking at the leaves of a camellia which brushed her shoulder where she sat.
“Now she is under my roof,” pursued the marchioness, “I feel in the position of her guardian. I regard you as a very dangerous character.”
A smile of bitter irony gleamed for a moment on Hammond’s lips.
“I rather think you must be right. I don’t know why it is, but I am feeling in a peculiarly lawless mood this evening. If Miss Yorke were not here, I am not at all sure that your diamonds would be safe.”
Something in the manner of this speech, rather than in the words, caused the marchioness to move several inches farther off along the settee. It was a distinct shock to her to hear the Severn diamonds made the subject of coarse jocularity. The one in the centre of her bosom had been given to the first Mauleverer by King John as a reward for resisting the agitation for Magna Charta. Those in the tiara above her forehead had been brought into the family by a left-handed daughter of John of Gaunt. The value of the whole was nearly a year’s income of the much-mortgaged Severn estates.
“Really, Mr. Hammond, you speak so strangely that if I didn’t know you so well I should think something was the matter with you.”
It was necessary to let her ladyship see clearly that she was out of place. Hammond cast on her a look which she had not seen in his eyes before.
“Do you know me well? Does any of us know another well? Don’t we, most of us, drift through life with our eyes half closed, ignorant of our aims, ignorant of our very natures, till some shock comes to awaken us, and in the moment of trial we find out for the first time who and what we really are?”
A subtle instinct told him, before he had finished speaking, that his words were being eagerly followed by the girl who sat on his right hand. On the marchioness they fell with something of the effect of a cold spray. She shivered and got up.
“Ah, yes, of course, all that is very true, no doubt,” she murmured, hastily. “But I must really be going back to look after the people.” She turned a feline glance on Belle. “I wouldn’t sit out here too long if I were you, Miss Yorke; you may catch cold.”
“Thank you; I am not afraid of that,” was the quiet answer.
The marchioness turned her eyes from one to the other, pursed up her lips with severity, and reluctantly retreated.
Hammond watched her exit with a sarcastic smile.
“I am afraid the marchioness believes I have been drinking,” he observed.
The cynicism jarred on Belle as harshly as the seriousness had jarred on the marchioness. There is no woman who can respond to a man through all his moods, not even she who loves him best.
“I wonder how much truth there is in what you said just now?”
Hammond turned and fixed an earnest gaze on her. He saw her for the first time in his experience with a troubled brow, but he never guessed the cause. There is no man who can follow a woman through all her moods, not even he who loves her best.
“That is what I wanted to ask you,” he said, in answer to her question. “We two have known each other for some time, haven’t we; but how much do I know of you, or you of me?”
Belle felt what was coming. She saw it in his eye, she heard it in his voice. Desperately she resolved to meet it half-way.
“I have been finding that out this evening. Since I have come here I have understood for the first time what you are and what I am. Mr. Hammond, after this evening we must not meet again.”
“Belle! Why do you say that?”
There was a note of anguish in his voice. He had been fighting a battle with himself all this time. It had never occurred to him that there might be another to overcome besides.
She looked him steadily in the face.
“Why do you call me Belle?”
“I thought we were friends,” he said. But he blushed as he said it.
“What kind of friends? Would your friendship with Lady Victoria allow you to call her by her Christian name? Don’t you see that the difference between her and me makes our friendship impossible?”
“Don’t you trust me, then?” asked the man.
“You have no right to ask me for my trust. You and I belong to different worlds. Where there is no equality there can be no friendship. It would have been better if we had never met.”
She spoke with a certain rigidity which baffled him. He did not know that the poor girl was but repeating the bitter lesson which had just been taught to her.
“But why,” he eagerly demanded—“why should you suddenly take this tone with me? I was going to ask you for your confidence. I meant to beg you to let me take your part against your enemies, and you rebuff me at the outset like this.”
“Have I enemies? I didn’t know that.” She spoke with a pathetic resignation. She had heard too much within the last half-hour to be much moved by any new disclosure. “But there is all the more reason that I should give them no handle against me. Consider what society is likely to think of such a friendship as ours—you, a public man, wealthy, ambitious, honored by the world, with a great career before you, and I a humble singer, whose very calling makes her name a mark for every spiteful tongue.”
“Why should we be afraid of what society thinks or says?”
“You can afford to ask that. You are a man, and can defy society; I am a woman, and to me its breath means life or death.”
Hammond sat silent for a minute; he felt that all this conversation was insincere. It was but the preface to what he had come there to say. How was he to pave the way for the questions he had resolved to put?
“Tell me,” he said, earnestly, “have I ever given you cause to think of me as other than an honorable man?”
Belle turned and looked at him.
“No,” was all she said.
“Will you let me tell you something—something that it may be painful for you to hear?”
Belle’s eyes opened wide. The apprehension of what was coming shone out in them, and Hammond, mistaking the meaning of that apprehension, faltered in his purpose.
“Speak! What is it?” she commanded.
“It is something which concerns yourself.”
Was he going to repeat to her the gossip at which the marchioness had only hinted, to tell her to her face that their names had been joined in the world’s calumnious breath? She gazed at him in absolute bewilderment.
“Tell it me—quickly!” she breathed.
“I am ashamed to repeat such a slander. Yet, since it is in circulation, it is only right that you should know it, if only that you may cause it to be crushed.”
“They say—they pretend—they connect your name with—”
“With yours, sir?” She sat upright, with flashing eyes.
“Great heavens, no!” He stared back at her with little less amazement than her own.
She sank slowly down again, the anger in her face changing to deepest scorn.
“With whose, then?”
“With the Marquis of Severn’s.”
“What!” She started up again in sheer astonishment. “Who dares? I have never seen nor spoken to him in my life!”
“Thank God!”
Not till he had heard the denial did the man realize what a burden it had lifted from his heart; and yet he believed that he loyally loved this woman.
“Who dares to slander me? Who dares to smirch my name with falsehoods?” Come what might, he should not go away doubting her.
“It was that man Despencer who told me first.”
“And you listened to him—you, an honorable man, and my friend?”
Hammond bowed his head. He thought he could bear her reproaches now.
“Go on; you can say nothing to me that I have not said already to myself. I have been a brute, a fool; I know it. I did give him the lie once, but his words rankled in my mind, and I could not rest till I had had the charge disproved.”
“If you are satisfied, go.”
Hammond started and shivered. He had not heard that tone before; he had not seen that deeply resolute expression, in which Belle’s face was set like stone.
“Oh, not like this! You will forgive me, Belle? You must! This lie has tortured me far worse than you.”
He might have made the excuse that he had only repeated the slander for her sake, and not for the satisfaction of his own doubts. But he scorned to stoop to subterfuge with her.
“Why should I? Your good opinion or your friendship are nothing to me any longer.”
“My good opinion—friendship! Ah, it is more than that! You know, you must know, that I have loved you all the time!”
“So much the worse. For you to speak of love to me is only another insult.”
“I did not mean to insult you,” was the humble answer. “I meant to offer you the love that a man offers to his betrothed.”
“Does a man cast suspicions on his betrothed?”
“I have not cast suspicions. My worst fault is to have listened to those of others. There is no love without jealousy.”
“There is no love without perfect trust. If a man really loves a woman, does he set himself to doubt her, to gather up the malicious tattle of her enemies, and carry it to her, like an accusing judge, and ask her to clear herself? Ah, no! If he loves her, he first crushes the slander and the enemy together, and then comes to tell her what he has done.”
“Listen to me.”
“Wait! But I cannot expect to be treated like that. My good name is of no importance to me; I am public property. There would be nothing to talk about in the club smoking-rooms if we poor singers were to be respected. It is natural that we should be bad. And so you come to me and repeat the accusations which you had not the courage to despise. And that is your love!”
“I implore you—”
“No! With us poor girls it is different. We have not your prudence and self-restraint. Where we love we do not ask for references. We give our hearts without reserve, and from the moment we have given them, instead of searching for stains on the character of the man we love, we set ourselves to see only the good in him; we shut our eyes to the evil; we screen his faults; if others attack him, we defend him; and if the world casts him out, we cling to him all the more.”
Her voice sank down and ended in a sob. Hammond clasped his hands together in despair.
“Why did I ever hesitate? I was a coward. I dreaded the idea of even a whisper being raised against my wife. Forgive me.”
“And you were right. Yes, I forgive you.”
The answer came softly, and the man’s heart was thrilled to the core.
“And something more,” he pleaded passionately. “Tell me that you love me like that.”
Belle slowly, gently shook her head.
“No. Why do you make it so hard for me? Leave me, I entreat you.”
Hammond turned faint.
“You do not love me, then?” he gasped.
She gave him a despairing look, and answered passionately:
“No! I don’t love you—I don’t love you!”
He rose up, without another word, and went away from her. The next instant, as the door closed behind him, Belle sank down on the seat, like a flower whose stem is broken, and the tears began to come like rain.
A door at the far end of the conservatory softly opened, and a man stepped through and came towards her, with his finger on his lips.
It was the Marquis of Severn.