Part 7 (1/2)

A ring of genuine pleasure had come into the young voice which a few moments before had only too plainly told a tale of dejection and bitterness.

Wantele turned and looked at her. For the first time that evening he smiled broadly, and there came into his eyes the humorous light which generally dwelt there.

”I suppose you know all about him,” he said dryly. ”I suppose you followed every step of the Expedition?”

”Of course I did!” she exclaimed. ”How father would have loved to meet General Lingard”--there came a touch of keen regret into her voice.

”I expect you'll meet your hero very often before you've done with him, Mabel”--as he said the words he struck a match and lit a cigarette--”for he and Jane Oglander are going to be married.”

”General Lingard and Jane Oglander?” Mabel could not keep a measure of extreme surprise and excitement out of her voice, but she was, what her dead father's old soldier servant always described her as being, ”a thorough little lady,” and after hearing Wantele's quiet word of a.s.sent to her involuntary question, she refrained, without any seeming effort, from pursuing the subject.

At last Wantele got up. ”Well,” he said. ”Well, Mabel? This is a queer, 'unked' kind of world, isn't it?”

She nodded her head, and without offering him her hand she unlatched the door.

When she knew him to be well away, she came back and, laying her head on the table, burst into tears. She loved Jane Oglander--she rejoiced in Jane's good fortune--but the contrast was too great between Jane's fate and hers.

But for Athena Maule, but for the spell Athena had cast over Bayworth Kaye, she, Mabel, would probably by now have been Bayworth's wife, on the way to India--India the land of her childish, of her girlish dreams.

CHAPTER V

”Nay, but the maddest gambler throws his heart.”

Richard Maule waited a while to see if his cousin would come to him, and then he went up to his bedroom.

He soon dismissed his man-servant, and the book he had meant to read in the night--a book on the newly-revealed treasures of Cretan art--lay ready to his feeble hand on the table by the wide, low bed which was the only new piece of furniture placed there since the room had been the nursery of his happy childhood. But he felt unwontedly restless, and soon he began moving about the low-ceilinged, square room with dragging, heavy footsteps.

When they had brought him back ill to death, as he had hoped, from Italy eight years before, it was here that he had insisted on being put; and there were good reasons for his choice, for the room communicated by easy shallow stairs with that part of the house where were the Greek Room, and the library which had been arranged for him by his grandfather as a delightful surprise on his seventeenth birthday.

Mr. Maule's bedchamber was in odd contrast to the rest of Rede Place.

The furnis.h.i.+ngs were frankly ugly, substantial veneered furniture had been chosen by the sensible, middle-aged woman to whom Theophilus Joy, after anxious consultation with the leading doctor of the day, had confided his precious orphan grandson. His old nurse's clean, self-respecting presence haunted, not unpleasantly, the room at times when Richard Maule only asked to forget the present in the past.

His wife, Athena, had never been in this room. Even when he was lying helpless, scarcely able to make himself understood by his nurses, the stricken man had been able to convey his strong wish concerning this matter of his wife's banishment from his sick room to d.i.c.k Wantele, and Athena had quietly acquiesced....

As time had gone on, Richard Maule had become in a very real sense master of this one room; here at least none had the right to disturb him or to spy on his infirmities unless he gave them leave.

He went across to the window which commanded a side view of the door by which the inmates of Rede Place generally let themselves in and out.

d.i.c.k, so he felt sure, was out of doors--no doubt walking off, as the young and hale are able to do, his anger and his pain.

A great yearning for his kinsman came over Richard Maule. Drawing the folds of his luxurious dressing-gown round his shrunken limbs, he painfully pushed a chair to a window and sat down there. And as he looked out into the October night, waiting for the sound which would tell him that d.i.c.k had come in, he allowed himself to do what he very seldom did--he thought of the past and surveyed, dispa.s.sionately, the present.

To the majority of people there is something repugnant in the sight of an old man married to a lovely young woman, and this feeling is naturally intensified when the husband happens to be in any way infirm.

Richard Maule was aware that these were the feelings with which he and his wife had long been regarded, both by their immediate neighbours and by the larger circle of the outer world where Mrs. Maule enjoyed the popularity so easily accorded to any woman who contributes beauty and a measure of agreeable animation to the common stock.

But this knowledge, painful as it might have been to a proud and sensitive man, found Richard Maule almost indifferent. Had he been compelled to define his feeling in words, he would probably have observed that, after having brought his life to such utter s.h.i.+pwreck as he had done, this added mortification was not of a nature to trouble him greatly.