Part 39 (1/2)

Thorpe threw his cigar-end aside, and then noted that it was almost dark. He strode up to the terrace two steps at a time, and swung along its length with a vigour and exhilaration of movement he had not known, it seemed to him, for years. He felt the excitement of a new incentive bubbling in his veins.

”Her Ladys.h.i.+p is in her sitting-room, sir,” a domestic replied to his enquiry in the hall. The t.i.tle arrested his attention from some fresh point of view, and he pondered it, as he made his way along the corridor, and knocked at a door. At the sound of a voice he pushed open the door, and went in.

Lady Cressage, looking up, noted, with aroused interest, a marked change in his carriage. He stood aggressively erect, his big shoulders squared, and his head held high. On his ma.s.sive face there was the smile, at once buoyant and contained, of a strong man satisfied with himself.

Something impelled her to rise, and to put a certain wistfulness of enquiry into her answering smile.

”Your headache is better then?” she asked him.

He looked puzzled for a moment, then laughed lightly. ”Oh--yes,” he answered. Advancing, he caught her suddenly, almost vehemently, in his arms, aud covered the face that was perforce upturned with kisses. When she was released from this overwhelming embrace, and stood panting and flushed, regarding him with narrowed, intent eyes, in which mystification was mellowed by the gleam of not-displeased curiosity, he preferred a request which completed her bewilderment.

”Mrs. Thorpe,” he began, with significant deliberation, but smiling with his eyes to show the tenderness underlying his words--”would you mind if we didn't dress for dinner this evening, and if we dined in the little breakfast-room--or here, for that matter--instead of the big place?”

”Why, not at all, if you wish it,” she answered readily enough, but viewing him still with a puzzled glance.

”I'm full of new ideas,” he explained, impulsively impatient of the necessity to arrange a sequence among his thoughts. ”I see great things ahead. It's all come to me in a minute, but I couldn't see it clearer if I'd thought it out for a year. Perhaps I was thinking of it all the time and didn't know it. But anyhow, I see my way straight ahead. You don't know what it means to me to have something to do. It makes another man of me, just to think about it. Another man?--yes, twenty men! It's a thing that can be done, and by G.o.d! I'm going to do it!”

She beheld in his face, as she scrutinized it, a stormy glow of the man's native, coa.r.s.e, imperious virility, rea.s.serting itself through the mask of torpor which this vacuous year had superimposed. The large features were somehow grown larger still; they dominated the countenance as rough bold headlands dominate a sh.o.r.e. It was the visage of a conqueror--of a man gathering within himself, to expend upon his fellows, the appet.i.tes, energies, insensibilities, audacities of a beast of prey. Her glance fluttered a little, and almost quailed, before the frank barbarism of power in the look he bent upon her. Then it came to her that something more was to be read in this look; there was in it a reservation of magnanimity, of protection, of entreating invitation, for her special self. He might tear down with his claws, and pull to pieces and devour others; but his mate he would shelter and defend and love with all his strength. An involuntary trembling thrill ran through her--and then she smiled up at him.

”What is it you're going to do?” she asked him, mechanically. Her mind roved far afield.

”Rule England!” he told her with gravity.

For the moment there seemed to her nothing positively incongruous in the statement. To look at him, as he loomed before her, uplifted by his refreshed and soaring self-confidence, it appeared not easy to say what would be impossible to him.

She laughed, after a fleeting pause, with a plainer note of good-fellows.h.i.+p than he had ever heard in her voice before.

”Delightful,” she said gayly. ”But I'm not sure that I quite understand the--the precise connection of morning-dress and dinner in a small room with the project.” He nodded pleased comprehension of the spirit in which she took him. ”Just a whim,” he explained. ”The things I've got in mind don't fit at all with ceremony, and that big barn of a room, and men standing about. What I want more than anything else is a quiet snug little evening with you alone, where I can talk to you and--and we can be together by ourselves. You'd like it, wouldn't you?”

She hesitated, and there was a novel confession of embarra.s.sment in her mantling colour and down-spread lashes. It had always to his eyes been, from the moment he first beheld it, the most beautiful face in the world--exquisitely matchless in its form and delicacy of line and serene yet sensitive grace. But he had not seen in it before, or guessed that there could come to it, this crowning added loveliness of feminine confusion.

”You would like it, wouldn't you?” he repeated in a lower, more strenuous tone.

She lifted her eyes slowly, and looked, not into his, but over his shoulder, as in a reverie, half meditation, half languorous dreaming.

She swayed rather than stepped toward him.

”I think,” she answered, in a musing murmur,--”I think I shall like--everything.”

CHAPTER XXVII

THORPE found the Duke of Glas...o...b..ry a much more interesting person to watch and to talk with, both during the dinner Sat.u.r.day evening and later, than he had antic.i.p.ated.

He was young, and slight of frame, and not at all imposing in stature, but he bore himself with a certain shy courtliness of carriage which had a distinction of its own. His face, with its little black moustache and large dark eyes, was fine upon examination, but in some elusively foreign way. There lingered a foreign note, too, in the way he talked.

His speech was English enough to the ear, it was true, but it was the considered English of a book, and its phrases had a deftness which was hardly native. He looked, if not a sad young man, then one conscious always of sufficient reasons for sadness, but one came, after a time, to see that the mood beneath was not melancholy. It had even its sprightly side, which shone out irregularly in his glance and talk, from a sober mean of amiable weariness.

Thorpe knew his extraordinary story--that of a poor tutor, earning his living in ignorance of the fact that he had a birthright of any sort, who had been miraculously translated into the heir, not only to an ancient t.i.tle but to vast collateral wealth. He had been born and reared in France, and it was there that the heralds of this stupendous change in his affairs had found him out. There was a good deal more to the story, including numerous unsavoury legends about people now many years dead, and it was impossible to observe the young Duke and not seem to perceive signs that he was still nervously conscious of these legends.

The story of his wife--a serene, grey-eyed, rather silent young person, with a pale face of some beauty, and with much purity and intellect--was strange enough to match. She also had earned her own living, as a private secretary or type-writing girl, or something of the sort, and her husband had deliberately chosen her after he had come into his t.i.tle. One might study her very closely, however, and catch no hint that these facts in any degree disconcerted her.

Thorpe studied her a good deal, in a furtive way, with a curiosity born of his knowledge that the Duke had preferred her, when he might have married his widowed cousin, who was now Thorpe's own wife. How he had come to know this, he could never have told. He had breathed it in, somehow, with the gossip-laden atmosphere of that one London season of his. It was patent enough, too, that his wife--his Edith--had not only liked this ducal youngster very much, but still entertained toward him a considerable affection. She had never dissembled this feeling, and it visibly informed her glance and manner now, at her own table, when she turned to speak with him, where he sat at her right hand. Thorpe had never dreamed of thinking ill of his wife's friends.h.i.+p, even when her indifference to what he thought had been most taken for granted. Now that this was all changed, and the amazing new glory of a lover had enveloped him, he had a distinct delight in watching the myriad charming phases of her kind manner, half-sisterly, half-motherly, toward the grave-faced young man. It was all a part of the delicious change which these past few days had wrought in her, this warm and supple softness of mien, of eye and smile and voice.

But how the Duke, if really he had had a chance to marry Edith, could have taken the type-writer instead, baffled speculation. Thorpe gave more attention to this problem, during dinner, than he did to the conversation of the table. His exchange of sporadic remarks with the young d.u.c.h.ess beside him was indeed an openly perfunctory affair, which left him abundant leisure to contemplate her profile in silence, while she turned to listen to the general talk, of which Miss Madden and the Hon. Winifred Plowden bore the chief burden. The talk of these ladies interested him but indifferently, though the frequent laughter suggested that it was amusing. He looked from his wife to the d.u.c.h.ess and back again, in ever-recurring surprise that the coronet had been carried past Edith. And once he looked a long time at his wife and the Duke, and formulated the theory that she must have refused him. No doubt that was why she had been sympathetically fond of him ever since, and was being so nice to him now. Yes--clearly that was it. He felt upon this that he also liked the Duke very much.