Volume II Part 28 (1/2)
”I do,” answered Vixen; ”but G.o.d only knows why you should do so.”
”Do you know no reason?”
”No.”
”Can't you guess one?”
”No; unless it is because my father's fortune will belong to me by-and-by, if I live to be five-and-twenty, and your position here will be lessened.”
”That is not the reason; no, I am not so base as that. That its not why I hate you, Violet. If you had been some dumpy, homely, country la.s.s, with thick features and a clumsy figure, you and I might have got on decently enough. I would have made you obey me; but I would have been kind to you. But you are something very different. You are the girl I would have perilled my soul to win--the girl who rejected me with careless scorn. Have you forgotten that night in the Pavilion Garden at Brighton? I have not. I never look up at the stars without remembering it; and I can never forgive you while that memory lives in my mind. If you had been my wife, Violet, I would have been your slave. You forced me to make myself your stepfather; and I will be master instead of slave. I will make your life bitter to you if you thwart me. I will put a stop to your running after another woman's sweetheart. I will come between you and your lover, Roderick Vawdrey. Your secret meetings, your clandestine love-making, shall be stopped. Such conduct as you have been carrying on of late is a shame and disgrace to your s.e.x.”
”How dare you say that?” cried Vixen, beside herself with anger.
She grasped the lamp with both her hands, as if she would have hurled it at her foe. It was a large moon-shaped globe upon a bronze pedestal--a fearful thing to fling at one's adversary. A great wave of blood surged up into the girl's brain. What she was going to do she knew not; but her whole being was convulsed by the pa.s.sion of that moment. The room reeled before her eyes, the heavy pedestal swayed in her hands, and then she saw the big moonlike globe roll on to the carpet, and after it, and darting beyond it, a stream of liquid fire that ran, and ran, quicker than thought, towards the open window.
Before she could speak or move, the flame had run up the lace curtain, like a living thing, swift as the flight of a bird or the gliding motion of a lizard. The wide cas.e.m.e.nt was wreathed with light. They two--Vixen and her foe--seemed to be standing in an atmosphere of fire.
Captain Winstanley was confounded by the suddenness of the catastrophe.
While he stood dumb, bewildered, Vixen sprang through the narrow s.p.a.ce between the flaming curtains, as if she had plunged into a gulf of fire. He heard her strong clear voice calling to the stablemen and gardeners. It rang like a clarion in the still summer night.
There was not a moment lost. The stablemen rushed with pails of water, and directly after them the Scotch gardener with his garden-engine, which held several gallons. His hose did some damage to the drawing-room carpet and upholstery, but the strong jet of water speedily quenched the flames. In ten minutes the window stood blank, and black, and bare, with Vixen standing on the lawn outside, contemplating the damage she had done.
Mrs. Winstanley rushed in at the drawing-room door, ghostlike, in her white _peignoir_, pale and scared.
”Oh, Conrad, what has happened?” she cried distractedly, just able to distinguish her husband's figure standing in the midst of the disordered room.
”Your beautiful daughter has been trying to set the house on fire,” he answered. ”That is all.”
CHAPTER XVI.
”That must end at once.”
A quarter of an hour later, when all the confusion was over, Violet was kneeling by her mother's chair, trying to restore tranquillity to Mrs.
Winstanley's fluttered spirits. Mother and daughter were alone together in the elder lady's dressing-room, the disconsolate Pamela sitting, like Niobe, amidst her scattered fineries, her pomade-pots and powder-boxes, fan-cases and jewel-caskets, and all the a.r.s.enal of waning beauty.
”Dear mother,” pleaded Violet, with unusual gentleness, ”pray don't give way to this unnecessary grief. You cannot surely believe that I tried to set this dear old home on fire--that I could be so foolish--granting even that I were wicked enough to do it--as to destroy a place I love--the house in which my father was born! You can't believe such a thing, mother.”
”I know that you are making my life miserable,” sobbed Mrs. Winstanley, feebly dabbing her forehead with a flimsy Valenciennes bordered handkerchief, steeped in eau-de-cologne, ”and I am sure Conrad would not tell a falsehood.”
”Perhaps not,” said Vixen with a gloomy look. ”We will take it for granted that he is perfection and could not do wrong. But in this case he is mistaken. I felt quite capable of killing him, but not of setting fire to this house.”
”Oh,” wailed Pamela distractedly, ”this is too dreadful! To think that I should have a daughter who confesses herself at heart a murderess.”
”Unhappily it is true, mother,” said Vixen, moodily contrite. ”For just that one moment of my life I felt a murderous impulse--and from the impulse to the execution is a very short step. I don't feel myself very superior to the people who are hanged at Newgate, I a.s.sure you.”
”What is to become of me?” inquired Mrs. Winstanley in abject lamentation. ”It is too hard that my own daughter should be a source of misery in my married life, that she should harden her heart against the best of stepfathers, and try, yes, actually try, to bring discord between me and the husband I love. I don't know what I have done that I should be so miserable.”
”Dear mother, only be calm and listen to me,” urged Violet, who was very calm herself, with a coldly resolute air which presently obtained ascendency over her agitated parent. ”If I have been the source of misery, that misery cannot too soon come to an end. I have long felt that I have no place in this house--that I am one too many in our small family. I feel now--yes, mamma, I feel and know that the same roof cannot cover me and Captain Winstanley. He and I can no longer sit at the same board, or live in the same house. That must end at once.”
”What complaint can you have to make against him, Violet?” cried her mother hysterically, and with a good deal more dabbing of the perfumed handkerchief upon her fevered brow. ”I am sure no father could be kinder than Conrad would be to you if you would only let him. But you have set yourself against him from the very first. It seems as if you grudged me my happiness.”