Outlaw and Lawmaker/Chapter 20
CHAPTER XX.
LORD ASTAR'S ATTENTIONS
As they went in from the dim garden and through the verandah, which was like a conservatory, with its decorations of palms, Elsie's dazzled eyes seemed to see in the glare of the ball-room beyond, only one face and form, and those belonged to Blake.
He was standing close to the doorway. Elsie wondered whether he would move away when he saw her, but he turned straight to them. But Elsie noticed that he kept his eyes on Lord Waveryng, and she noticed, too, an odd watchful expression in the eyes that she had never seen there before. Lord Waveryng spoke a word to him. He, too, kept his eyes with a hard puzzled stare on Blake. He said "You see we weren't so long behind you in getting here after all. But old Stukeley is hard to move, when it's a case of Mouton Rothschild '68—capital wine that—not damaged in the least by the voyage."
"Not damaged at all," replied Blake in a mechanical tone.
"I say," said Lord Waveryng, abruptly, "do you happen to remember what Lafitte Coola used to give us at the Castle on high days?"
Blake returned the look which Lord Waveryng gave him quite unflinchingly.
"No, I don't remember," he said, and turned to Elsie. "Miss Valliant, I am afraid I am rather late in my application, but I must plead my steward's duties as a claim on your mercy. May I hope for the honour of a dance?"
Elsie's heart throbbed so violently that she instinctively put the hand which her bouquet shielded against her side. She dared not look at him. The thought of the wild scene of the night before maddened her almost into fury. What right had he? how dared he think that he could trifle with her so?
"I am sorry," she said, and her words fell like drops of steel. "But I am engaged for every dance."
Blake said nothing. He only bowed, and Lord Waveryng put his arm round Elsie, and steered her into the dance.
"I can see," he said when they paused presently, "that Mr. Blake is not quite in your good books. I wonder how he has offended you."
"Oh, no," said Elsie, trying to speak calmly, "he has not offended me, but of course at this time in the evening I have no dances left."
"I would give a good deal," said Lord Waveryng, "for the cheek to ask that man whether he is Morres Blake come to life again. I think I shall do it by-and-bye."
"Who is Morres Blake?" asked Elsie.
"Lord Coola's brother, a fellow that fell over a cliff, and was carried out to sea and drowned; at least, so they said. But you see somebody might have picked him up, and he might not have been drowned; and what gives the theory a spark of probability is that Blake would have been had up to a certainty on a charge of inciting his regiment to Fenianism if he had not got killed at the nick of time for his family, and for his own reputation, we won't say his life, since if he was drowned, he lost that anyhow."
"Ah!" Elsie drew a deep breath. Things seemed to suddenly become clear to her.
"It must be ten or twelve years ago," Lord Waveryng went on. "I met Blake, the Morres Blake you know, twice at Castle Coola, and I don't often forget a face. In fact I've got an astonishing memory for faces, Miss Valliant. I ought to have been a Royalty."
They went on again. In the next pause Lord Waveryng talked of Lord Horace. "I'm going up to see the Dell," he said. "I hear Horace's works have come to a dead stop for want of funds. Well, if he is likely to keep out of mischief—and he ought to with such a charming wife—I might see if I couldn't do something. He is my wife's favourite brother, though I can't say I ever had a great opinion myself of Horace's capabilities, but he is a good-hearted chap, and I had a lucky haul with the Two Thousand. I suppose you know that I go in for racing a bit, Miss Valliant; and I might give Horace a helping hand. He'll not get another penny from his father."
For Ina's sake Elsie rejoiced at Lord Waveryng's benevolent intentions, and thought how pleased her mother would be to hear of the excellent impression Ina had made. That was very evident. Lady Waveryng was sitting now beside her sister-in-law, and they were on the most affectionate terms.
Frank Hallett came next on the list of Elsie's partners. "Why are you not dancing with Blake this evening?" he asked abruptly.
"I don't know," said Elsie simply, and it hurt him to hear the note of pain in her voice. "Frank," she said hurriedly, "please don't talk to me about Mr. Blake. Let us talk of other things—of how I am enjoying myself, for instance."
"Are you enjoying yourself, Elsie?"
"Of course I am. I have had a success. Every one has been telling me that I look very well. Lord Waveryng has been charming. I have been honoured by an offer of marriage." She laughed hysterically.
"An offer of marriage?" he said anxiously.
"I did not accept it." She still laughed—"But it was—exciting. Come, Frank, don't let us lose any of this lovely waltz. I am in wild spirits to-night."
Poor Elsie! And yet when she went into the cloak room in the early dawn it seemed to her as though her heart must break, so agonizing was the pain of it. All the pretty colour had gone from her face. As she stood in the corridor waiting for the jingle which was to take them over the bridge to Fermoy's, she looked like a ghost with wild eyes.
"Are you very tired, Miss Valliant?" said Blake, suddenly, beside her.
She gave a great start. He was still impassive. "Yes, very tired," she answered.
"Have you had a pleasant evening?" he asked, in the same tone.
"Yes, thank you," she answered. She lifted her eyes, which had not dared to meet his. They met them now, and something in the expression of his eased her pain. For there was pain, too, in his eyes, and a great yearning.
"Mr. Blake," she exclaimed involuntarily, and made a faint movement of her hand towards him. He put out his hand, and took hers. "Good-night, Miss Valliant," he said; "do you see that faint red streak in the sky, and do you know that in another hour it will be sunrise? Sleep well, and when you wake, don't" he hesitated, and pressed her hand as he relinquished it. "Try not to think too hardly of me."
The girl said not a word. She moved proudly past him.
"Ina, I am sure the carriage is there," she said, and at that moment Lord Horace came crossly to them. Lord Horace had taken a little more champagne than was good for him.
"What an infernal time you have been with your cloaks!" he said. "Come along, I can't see the thing, and we may wait here till Doomsday for it to fetch us. Come and get into the first jingle we can find that will take us to the ferry. We can walk the rest of the way."
A few minutes later Blake stood on the steps of the Clubhouse lighting his cigar. He was going to walk to the ferry. Lord Waveryng joined him.
"You are going to walk, I see. So am I, and our ways lie together as far as the turning to Government House."
The two men stepped out into the fresh scented air of the early morning. There were faint sounds of awakening birds and insects, and the greyness was so clear that the color of the begonias, which festooned some of the verandahs along the roadway, showed curiously brilliant. They exchanged a few commonplace remarks about the scenery, the vegetation and the beauty of the river. Then Lord Waveryng halted suddenly. and turned on his companion deliberately taking his cigar from his mouth.
"I think I ought to tell you," he said "that I never forget a face, and that I recognized you almost as soon as I heard your name this evening. I presume you have good reasons for not wishing to be identified as Captain Morres Blakes of the?'
"I have the best reasons that man can have." said Blake. "Lord Waveryng, I'll be as frank with you as you are with me, and you know my reasons almost as well as I do."
"It's twelve years ago," said Lord Waveryng, "and things have changed a good deal since then. This Parliamentary movement has made a difference. I don't suppose the authorities would want to rake up that business. The reason why I tackled you at once is that I don't know whether you know that Lord Coola's two boys died of diphtheria last year, and that you stand next in succession to Coola,"
"No," said Blake, startled. "I did not know it, and I am truly sorry."
"It is worth your thinking about," said Lord Waveryng. "I thought I had better tell you."
Blake was silent for a few moments. At last he spoke. "There were four lives between me and Coola when—when I left Ireland, and there seemed a probability of several more. It was not to be supposed that my brother would not marry again after Lady Coola's death; and who could have dreamed that my brother William would have been carried off so young—and now these boys! Poor chaps! It is like fatality."
"Yes," assented Lord Waveryng, "seems like a fatality, don't it? Anyhow you may be the next Lord Coola."
"Coola will marry again now," said Blake, decidedly. "He is bound to do it."
"I don't think he will," said Lord Waveryng. "He believes in his first wife's ghost. It's a kind of mania. You Blakes are all a little queer, you know."
"Yes, I know very well," answered Morres Blake, bitterly. "It's in the blood. That queerness is responsible for a good deal."
Lord Waverying looked at him keenly. "You are sane enough," he said.
"Am I!" cried Blake, passionately. "I'm mad. I tell you—mad—mad."
"You were mad when you threw your chances away, and went in for that Fenian business; but it was the aberration of youth. They tell me that you make a good colonial politician. Curious, isn't it, when one comes to think of it, that you should be Colonial Secretary of Leichardt's Land."
Blake laughed strangely. Again there was silence.
The men walked on, puffing their cigars. They had reached the place where the street divided into two, one leading to the ferry, the other past the Houses of Parliament to the great gates of Government House. Here they paused.
"Lord Waveryng," Blake said impulsively, "I trust you."
"I never betrayed confidence in my life," said the other—"at least I hope not, willingly. If you wish to be thought dead, why as far as I am concerned you are dead. But I think you make a mistake in not facing the music."
They shook hands and parted. But Blake did not go straight to Fermoy's.
Careless of what might be thought of him, he walked on through the paddock in which Riverside Cottage stood. He looked wistfully at the little closed up house and at the verandah in which was Elsie's chair, and where her work-basket still lay on the rough table. He was only driven away by the sight of Peter the Kanaka up betimes to gather rosellas for the shop on the Point, which bought such garden stuff as the widow had to dispose of. He slipped down among the lantaerna shrubs that grew close to the garden fence, and made his way back by a circuitous, but less public track, along the river bank to Fermoy's. ········· During the days that followed the Club ball, Elsie Valliant's mental and moral condition might have been expressed in the plaint of Mariana, though, to be sure, the outward circumstances of her life were very different from those of the lady of the Moated Grange. Life at Leichardt's Town was at high pressure. Life at Riverside Cottage was at high pressure too. The verandah receptions were more brilliant and more sought after than ever, and gained éclat from the presence of the Waveryngs and an admixture of the Government House set; not certainly in the persons of Sir Theophilus and Lady Stukeley, but in the shape of the aide-de-camp and private secretary, and of the more or less distinguished strangers who frequented Government House at this time. There was always some bustle of coming and going, of flirtation, or of making ready for flirtation. But still Blake came not.
They met often, and yet not so often as would have been the case a month before. It seemed to Elsie that Blake avoided all the informal parties which once, for the sake of a waltz or talk with-her, he had welcomed so eagerly. And at the more ceremonious functions, there was an excuse for the formal nature of their intercourse. Naturally at the public balls and at the Government House at Homes it was not to be supposed that the Colonial Secretary could devote himself exclusively to one pretty girl. Blake paid attention to a few of the Leichardt's Town young ladies, and to Elsie there was in this fact a faint consolation. At any rate she could not feel jealous of Mrs. Torbolton, or of the wife of the Minister for Works, or even of Lady Waveryng, who declared herself charmed with Blake, and made him into a sort of cicerone. But in truth the girl's own being was torn in tatters. Wounded pride, love, the sense of humiliation, and insult, made her days an anguish and her nights a terror. And yet she laughed all the time, and she flirted with everybody and made herself into a very scorn of Leichard's Town matrons by reason of her unblushing levity.
Just at this time one of the younger of the Royal Princes, who was making a tour of the Colonies, paid a long-expected week's visit to Leichardt's Town, and the occasion was one of wild excitement and of enthusiastic demonstration of Antipodean loyalty. Elsie had the satisfaction of seeing Blake in official capacity, taking part in the various pageants, as one of the committee of reception; and in spite of her misery and her anger against him, she felt a savage pride in the manner in which he acquitted himself. She was at the great ceremony of the landing, and at the Mayor's ball, at the School of Arts, in the evening. She was also at the races, at which one or two of the horses which had exploited at Tunimba ran, with less credit to themselves and their owners; she was at the picnic in the Government steamer, in which the Prince was shown the bay and the islands; and at all the functions for which Frank Hallett's efforts and the reflected glory of the Waveryngs secured her a place. It was all very brilliant, and she had her fill of admiration. The Prince was greatly taken by her beauty, and danced with her so often as to fill his guardians with a half amused alarm. Perhaps this was why Lord Astar, one of the Prince's suite, made violent love to Elsie, and short of absolutely proposing marriage, did everything which could be expected from a suitor for her hand. Lord Astar found the verandah receptions very much to his taste, and on the days when he was off duty during the latter part of the Prince's visit, might usually be seen seated at Elsie's feet, with his legs dangling over the edge of the Riverside verandah in the most approved colonial fashion, or else lounging on the steps that led to the boat-house, another favourite scene for Elsie's flirtations. The Prince would have liked to take part also in Elsie's verandah receptions, but on this point the Stukeleys and the noble Admiral who had him in charge were inexorable.
Lord Astar was amusing, and clever, and fascinating, and he was very much a man of the world. Elsie had never met anyone of his type, though since the arrival of the Waveryngs her experience of the English aristocracy had extended somewhat beyond her brother-in-law. It struck her that Lord Astar's type was most nearly approached by Morres Blake in his lighter moods. Certainly nothing more widely removed from the type could be conceived than Frank Hallett.
It may have been with some wild idea of making Blake jealous that Elsie flirted so desperately with Lord Astar. All Leichardt's Town—that is, the portion of it which constituted society—remarked her behaviour on the day of the races. They were in the grand stand. Ina and her husband in that portion which was railed off for the Government House party and the higher officials, but Elsie with the Prydes in a less exalted position. She was looking lovely in a grey dress with soft lace at the neck and a bewitching bonnet made out of the breast of an Australian bird. Lord Astar admired her dress, and Elsie told him that she had sat up all the night before to finish it. She also informed him that the bonnet, or at least the bird which composed it, had been a present from King Tommy, of Yoolaman.
"And so the Prince is not your only royal admirer," said Lord Astar. "Are lower mortals privileged to lay tributes of loyalty at your feet?"
As he spoke, Elsie became suddenly aware that Blake was passing along the gangway behind her chair. She felt that he stopped, knew instinctively that he had heard Lord Astar's speech, and was waiting for her reply. A demon of recklessness seized her, she looked coquettishly up at Lord Astar and answered very distinctly, "Certainly. Tributes are always welcome."
"Miss Valliant," Blake's incisive tones seemed to cut the air, "Lady Horace has gone down to the saddling paddock, and she asked me to bring you to her."
Elsie started. Blake moved a chair beside her.
"You will come?" His eyes were full upon her.
She rose obediently; it would have been impossible for her to disobey the mandate of those eyes. Lord Astar bowed and made way for her.
"I shall not forget," he said very low.
Blake piloted her down the stairs of the grand stand. When they stood on the lawn, he turned and said deliberately, "Lady Horace is not in the saddling paddock. I don't know in the least where she is, and she did not send me for you. I brought you here to tell you that you must not accept presents from Lord Astar."
"Surely," said Elsie, bitterly, "that can be of very little consequence to you."
"No, it is not of consequence to me," he answered, "but it is of consequence to yourself. I know Lord Astar. I know the sort of reputation he has in regard to women. You compromise your reputation by allowing him to pay you the attentions which have been making you so conspicuous these last few days. Please take my word for this. He is a more dangerous opponent in the game which we have been playing than I have been. Don't play that game with him; the consequences may be disagreeable."
"In what way?"
"In this—Astar is quite capable of insulting a woman who places herself in a false position."
"And you," she cried passionately, "have you not shown yourself capable of insulting a woman who was fool enough to place herself at your mercy?"
He turned very pale. An impetuous answer rose to his lips. He uttered one vehement word and checked himself.
"I beg your pardon," he said, "I have nothing else to say. I have no justification for the impulse that made me take you in my arms that night. I can only ask you to believe that there has never been in my mind a disrespectful thought of you. And then" he paused and went on in a different tone, "the situation was understood between us. It had been a challenge. There had been an open fight, and I had suffered severely enough to make me feel a savage wish to show you that you were beaten."
They had walked on, not in the direction of the saddling paddock, but among the gum-trees at the back of the Grand Stand, where, the view of the course being obstructed by the building, there was little or no crowd; indeed, except for a few stragglers in care of luncheon carts, the spot was almost deserted. Elsie turned fiercely upon Blake. Her eyes were flashing; her bosom heaving.
"What right have you to say that I was beaten? You said that I—that I cared for you. What reason did I give you for thinking so? Wasn't I playing the game, too? Do you think I have fallen so low as to give my heart to a man who—who has shown me that he despises me. I despise you, Mr. Blake; I hate you."
Blake stood perfectly immovable. "I am glad of that," he said quietly. "I wish you to hate me. But you are quite wrong in the other thing. I do not despise you."
"Why—why?" stammered Elsie. "Why should you wish me to hate you?"
"Because it would not be for your happiness that you should love me."
"And why?" she repeated with the persistency of a child.
"Because," he answered, "I cannot" He stopped and added more calmly, "Because in my scheme of life marriage has no place."
Elsie turned, and they walked a few steps back without speaking.
"You have not given me credit for much cleverness, Mr. Blake," she said. "You evidently don't seem to think that I am able to take a hint. I fancy that you warned me before we—before we challenged each other—against cherishing any false hopes."
The bitterness of her tone hurt Blake keenly.
"Thank you," he said. "It is a wholesome lesson for me to be made to feel that I am a conceited ass."
Again they walked on in silence. They were near the Grand Stand.
"Please don't go up for a minute or two yet," he said. "We have wandered from the question."
"And the question is?"
"Lord Astar's obvious intention of making you a present which will probably take the form of an article of jewellery. Miss Valliant, I beseech you, for your own sake"
"Hush," she exclaimed passionately. "I don't want you to say anything more. I am old enough to take care of myself; and if not, I have others who have a better right to protect me."
"Very well. Forgive me for my presumption. I will not offend you again." He turned deliberately. "We had better go back now," he said, and conducted her to the stand, leaving her in her place beside Minnie Pryde with a ceremonious bow.
Elsie did not speak to him again that day. Lord Astar came back presently, and hardly quitted Elsie's side the rest of the day. When they got home, Minnie Pryde insisted on telling Mrs. Valliant of Elsie's conquest.
The silly woman was beside herself with delight. Elsie married to Lord Astar! Ina's marriage was as nothing in comparison. Why not? If the Prince admired Elsie, why should not Lord Astar marry her? She had been quite right in giving Frank Hallett an undecided answer—quite right in keeping that pushing handsome Mr. Blake and his less handsome and more pushing partner at a distance. Ah, Elsie was her pride and her joy! Elsie would yet be the glory of her old age.
The girl burst into a passionate fit of tears. "Oh, mother, mother!" she cried. "For pity's sake leave me alone, and expect nothing of me."