Leslie's Loyalty
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"Do not mention it, my dear sir," he said, waving his hand. "I commit them to your care with every confidence, assured that they will receive every consideration and appreciation from you. Come, Leslie, as you said, we must not take up too much of Mr. Arnheim's time. Good morning, sir. I leave you to conduct all negotiations with your client. I have every confidence in you. Good morning!"
He gave his hand to Mr. Arnheim with the air of a painter-prince, and with a glance round the room as if he already saw his pictures placed among the other gems, stalked nervously out.
Leslie hesitated for a moment, then held out her hand. For a moment she seemed incapable of speech, then her trembling lips parted, and she faltered:
"You have been very good, and – and patient, and forbearing, sir, and I am grateful, very grateful."
"Don't mention it, Miss Lisle," he said, touched by her loveliness and sadness. "I quite understand – that is – well, I can't quite understand!"
Leslie's face burnt like fire.
"Why his – his grace – ," she faltered.
Mr. Arnheim looked puzzled.
"His lordship!" he corrected her, but Leslie was too agitated to notice the correction.
"I cannot explain," she said in a troubled voice. "But – you will see him?"
"Yes, certainly," assented Mr. Arnheim.
"Will you tell him, please – " her voice broke, and her hands clasped and unclasped – "will you tell him that I came here against my will – that I was obliged to come, and that – that I wish him to forget everything that has passed. That neither my father nor I wish to see him again. That we wish to pass out of his life as if we had never seen, never known him. Will you tell him this? You – you think it strange, unbecoming, that I should give you this message, Mr. Arnheim but – " her voice broke – "but, perhaps you have a daughter of your own, and – and thinking of her you will not refuse – ."
She broke down, and covered her face with her hands.
Mr. Arnheim had a daughter, as it happened, and he did think of her.
"I don't understand, quite, Miss Lisle," he said, in a low voice; "but I understand enough to convey your message."
Leslie gave him her hand without another word, and hurried after her father.
She found him descending the stairs slowly, and he stopped as she reached him, and nodded at her.
"One moment, Leslie," he said, in nervous accents. "I forgot to ask Mr. Arnheim if his gallery is insured. Such works as I have left with him are – are priceless!"
Before she could stop him, he had turned and reascended the stairs, and re-entered the gallery. Leslie followed him. The gallery was empty, but voices were heard behind the partition, and Mr. Arnheim could be heard exclaiming in mingled indignation, pity, and amusement:
"The man is as mad as a hatter!"
Leslie laid her hand upon her father's arm.
"Come away, dear!" she implored; but he shook her hand off, and put his finger to his lip warningly.
"Hush! Be silent! I want to hear what he is saying! These men never express themselves fully about the pictures in the presence of the artists. Now, listen, and you will hear what he really thinks. Hush! It is quite fair, quite!" and he chuckled confidently.
Leslie, turned to stone with apprehension and dread, stood still and waited.
"Mad as a hatter!" continued Mr. Arnheim to some one behind the partition. "The pictures he raves about are simply daubs! The daubs of a lunatic who has had access to paint and brushes. Look at this! He called it a seascape! Look at it! Why, a schoolboy of fourteen would blush to have painted it! In fact, no human being in possession of his senses could have produced it! Did you ever see anything like it? I never did, and I've had some queer experiences in the course of business. If it hadn't been for that sweet creature, his daughter, I should have burst out laughing. But something – dash me if I know what – kept me quiet. Look here, it's a dashed shame, that's what it is. He told me to write for the man, and I thought it was all on the square. But it's my opinion he's got some game in hand with the daughter. I might have guessed that, seeing the sort of man he is. These swells are all alike. Yes it's a dashed shame! She's too good to be made a fool of and deceived. But did you ever see such an awful lunatic daub as this, and this, and this!" the speaker's voice rose in crescendo as he evidently showed each of Francis Lisle's pictures. "There was never anything like 'em out of a madhouse!"
The voice ceased, for lack of breath, and Leslie, horror-stricken, turned to her father. He was leaning against the wall, his face white, livid, his jaw dropped, his eyes staring vacantly.
"Father! father!" she cried in a low voice.
He did not seem to hear her, but his lips moved and she could hear a faint, horrible echo of the words that had been spoken behind the screen.
"Come away, dear!" she implored him. "Come away!"
He dropped his eyes to her face and tried to smile; but it was a hideous grimace.
"Yes, yes," he said, hoarsely, almost inarticulately, "let us go home. Let us – ."
She took his hand, drew his arm through hers, and led him down the stairs. He went with the docility, the helplessness of a child, and sank into a corner of the cab with his eyes dull and lifeless, but his lips still moving.
Presently he beckoned to her. "What – what did he say?" he asked tremulously, his face working.
"It – it does not matter what he said, dear," she said soothingly. "Do not think of it. Try to forget it! Lean against me, dear!"
But he put her from him, not with his old impatient irritability, but with a gentleness that was quite new with him; and lying back in the cab stared at the floor, his lips moving, and Leslie could hear him still repeating the words they had heard from Mr. Arnheim.
It seemed an age before the cab reached Torrington Square, and when it did so the man Leslie helped out was an older man by twenty years than he who had left it that morning.
She helped him up to his room and tried to cheer and comfort him; but, for the first time in her life, her loving flattery proved of no avail.
He listened with vacant eyes and wan, hopeless face, and at last, he suddenly flung his hands before his eyes and uttered a low cry of despair, and awakening.
"God help me!" he cried. "I am a fraud and a lie! I see it all, now. A fraud and a lie! The man was right; I cannot paint!" He caught up a canvas that lay against the wall, and gazed at it. "It is a hideous daub, as he said. It is the work of a madman. I have been mad. Oh, God, if I could have remained so."
"My dear, my dear!" she murmured, kneeling beside him and gently drawing the picture from his weak, trembling hands. "Don't think of what – what he said."
"Not think of it!" he cried, shaking with emotion. "I must think of it, for he spoke the truth. I have been mad, mad! But my eyes are open now. Take them away from me," he motioned to the pictures, "take them away. I cannot bear the sight of them. And – and yet I have been so happy, so hopeful!" and he hid his face with his hands.
Leslie watched beside him till he fell into a deep, deathlike sleep; then she stole downstairs and sent for a doctor. A young man from one of the neighbouring squares came, and though he was young he was not foolish. A glance at the sleeping man told him the sad truth.
"Have you – has your father any relations, any friends who – whom he would like to see?" he asked gently.
Leslie, kneeling beside the bed, looked up at him with sharp and sudden dread in her eyes.
"Do you – do you mean – ? Oh, what is it you mean?" she moaned.
The doctor laid his hand upon her shoulder. "The truth is always best, always," he said gently. "Your father has suffered a severe shock; the heart – ." He stopped. "For his sake try and be calm, my dear young lady."
Leslie knelt beside him all through the night, and all through the long hours her conscience whispered accusingly, "It is you – you, who have done it. But for you he would have gone on dreaming and living; but for you – and Yorke!"
Toward dawn Francis Lisle awoke. The doctor was standing beside the bed, Leslie on her knees.
He raised his wan, wasted face from the pillow and seemed to be looking for something; then his eyes rested on her anguished ones, and he knew her and forced a smile.
"Is – is that you, Leslie?" he said, in so low a voice that she had to lay her face against his to hear him. "Is that you? I have had a singular dream. Most singular!"
"What – what was it, dear?" she said at last.
He smiled again.
"I dreamt that my picture had been refused by the Academy. Absurd, wasn't it? Fancy them refusing one of my pictures! Mine! Francis Lisle's! Ridiculous as it is, it – it upset me. I – I must be out of sorts. There is only one thing for that kind of complaint: Work. Get – get a fresh canvas stretched for me, Leslie, and I will commence a new picture. Let me see, what did we get for the last? Three thousand pounds, wasn't it?"
"Yes, yes, dear!" she murmured.
"A large sum, a large sum, but not half what we shall get. Fame, fame and fortune at last, Leslie! I always told you it would come."
He put out his wasted hand and smoothed her hair lovingly – and, alas! patronizingly. "Always knew it would come, Leslie! Art is long and – and life is brief. I must work hard now fame and success have brought me the victor's laurels. How dark it is – " the sunlight was streaming through the window – "how dark! Too dark to commence to-day; but to-morrow, Leslie dear, to-morrow – ." His voice grew fainter and ceased. The doctor bent over him, then stood upright and laid his hand upon Leslie's shoulder with a touch that told her all.
Francis Lisle had gone to the land where to-morrow and to-day are swallowed up in Eternity.
CHAPTER XXV.
"FORGOTTEN ME, HAS HE?"
If ever a man was in earnest, Yorke, Viscount Auchester, was. He was going to marry Leslie! The thought dwelt with him all the way up to town, hovered about him as he lay awake throughout nearly the whole night, and came to him in the morning with a joy exceeding description.
To marry Leslie!
What had he done to deserve such happiness, such bliss, he asked himself as he hurried through his tub and dressing? And while he ate his breakfast in a feverish, restless kind of haste, he pictured and planned out their future; a future to be spent side by side till Death, and Death alone, parted them.
They would leave London immediately, after the marriage, and cross the Channel. Perhaps they'd stay for a while in Paris; but only for a few days. It would be too big and noisy for such bliss as theirs. No, he would take her to some quiet spot in Normandy; perhaps to Rouen, that delightful old-world town with its magnificent churches and historic streets. Why, he could see themselves standing arm in arm in the vast cathedral, listening reverently to the grand service; he could see Leslie's face with the sweet gravity in her lovely eyes, and the half pensive and yet happy smile on her pure lips. He fancied her by his side looking up at the carved gables of the quaint houses; or seated at one of the little marble tables at the Cafe Blanc, with its shining copper vessels and glittering glass. Then they could go on into Germany; up the Rhine. How delightful to have her beside him as the steamer toiled against the stream and the delicious panorama unfolded itself mile by mile! Then, if they chose, there were Switzerland and Italy. There was Lucerne, for instance. How she would delight in Lucerne, with its marvelous lake, in which old Pilatus shadows himself, with its famous bridge spanning the emerald Reuss; with its snug cathedral in which the wonderful organ surges and wails as no other organ can surge and wail, save that of honored Milan.
Happy! He would make her happy or know the reason why! He would devote every hour of his life, every particle of his by no means gigantic intellect to the effort to prove how dearly he loved her.
He sat for a little while after breakfast making a mental plan of his procedure. He would have to act prudently and warily. No hint of what he was about to do must be allowed to get out. If his numerous creditors, Jew and Gentile, had the least suspicion that he was about to marry a penniless angel instead of Lady Eleanor Dallas, the heiress, they would swoop down upon him. No, he would be very cautious.
He had gone round to Mr. Arnheim, the dealer, on the evening before, immediately he had reached London, and was very cautious with him; giving him to understand that he merely wanted a small picture of Mr. Lisle's, and asking Mr. Arnheim in quite a casual way to write and ask Mr. Lisle whether he would accept a commission.
"Don't mention my name, please," he said; and Mr. Arnheim had smiled and shaken his head.
Yorke went away quite confident that the vaguest of letters from the great dealer would bring Francis Lisle post haste to London; and, as we know, he was right.
Then he went down to Doctors' Commons, and inquired about the license.
He knew no more about the business than the veriest schoolboy; but he had a vague idea that you could buy a license somewhere in that strange locality, and that armed with that he could marry Leslie right away at once. At once! The thought sent the blood rushing to his handsome face, and made St. Paul's Cathedral, hard by which is Doctors' Commons, waver before his eyes.
A seedy-looking gentleman led him to the Faculty office where the mystic license was to be obtained, and a grave and sedate clerk got off a high stool at a desk and put several questions to Yorke, who for the first time in his life – or the second, perhaps, for he was nervous when he had asked Leslie to be his wife – felt embarrassed and agitated.
"Is it an ordinary license you require, or a special?" asked the clerk.
Yorke looked doubtful.
"What is the difference?" he asked, almost shyly, and struggling with an actual blush.
The clerk eyed him with cold superiority.
"By an ordinary license," he explained, "you can marry in the church of the parish in which one of the parties resides; and only there. And he or she must have resided there fifteen days. With a special license you can marry in a particular church without having resided in the parish fifteen days; but you would have to give sufficient reasons for requiring this special license."
Yorke stared at the dingy floor while he thought the matter out.
He knew of a quiet little church near Bury Street – a "little church around the corner," so to speak, to which he and Leslie could go, the morning after her arrival in London; and with no one but the parson, the clerk, and pew-opener the wiser. Yes, an ordinary license would do, he said.
The clerk inclined his head – just as if he were a shopman selling gloves! – and went off to another clerk at another desk, and presently appeared with an affidavit.
"What's this? the license?" said Yorke.
"No. You will have to swear this. I shall have to ask you to accompany me to the next office, to a solicitor. You have to swear that the parties are of age, and that one of you has resided in the parish fifteen days. You are prepared to do so, I presume?"
It is to be feared that Yorke was prepared to do anything to obtain his Leslie, and he was led off – he felt like a criminal of the deepest dye – to another dingy office, and there repeated the oath gabbled out by the solicitor. Then he returned to the proctor's office, and, after waiting a quarter of an hour, the clerk handed him a document.
"What have I got to pay?" asked Yorke, prepared for a demand, say, of fifty pounds. "Only two pounds two and sixpence!" he said, with a surprise that made even that solemn clerk smile.
Only two pounds two and sixpence for the privilege of marrying Leslie! He stood and gazed at the mystic document, and laughed aloud, so that the seedy man who had conducted him to the office eyed him rather fearfully, and pocketing the half-sovereign Yorke gave him, scrambled off, fully convinced that the young man was mad.
And indeed he could scarcely be considered in full possession of his senses that day. Nearly every hour he took out that precious license and read it through or gazed at the imposing coat of arms at the top, and the Archbishop's signature at the bottom; and every time put it away again in his breast coat pocket. He patted the coat to feel that the document was there safe and sound.
From Doctors' Commons he walked to the Dorchester Club.
Everybody knows that aristocratic institution. It is not so magnificent as some of the modern political clubs; some of them are palaces compared with which those of the Caesars were very small potatoes; it had no marble entrance hall and oak-paneled dining-room, and its smoking-room was not as vast as a church; but it was snug and comfortable, and excellent to a degree. You had to have your name down on the list of candidates full fifteen or twenty years before you could hope to be balloted in, and some fathers put their sons down when they were eighteen months old.
Yorke was well known at the club, and the hall porter in his glass box bowed to him with a mixture of respect and recognition which he accorded to a very few of the members.
"There are no letters for me, Stephens, I suppose?" said Yorke.
"No, my lord, none."
"Ah, well, I expect one or a telegram directly," said Yorke, trying to speak casually. "If it comes just send into the smoking-room, or dining-room, or drawing-room, in fact and see if I'm in the club. I want it directly it comes, you understand."
"Certainly my lord," was the response. "If your lordship is in the club when the letter arrives I will see that you have it at once."
Yorke sauntered into the drawing-room and took up a paper; but he did not see a word of the page he gazed at. He was calculating how soon that letter could possibly reach him.
Then he went out, and making his way to Regent Street examined the shop windows carefully, and ultimately made several purchases.
He bought a lady's ulster, a wonderful garment of camel's hair, soft as lambs' wool and as warm, with cuffs that could be let down over the hands, and a hood that could be drawn completely over the head.
No lady with this marvelous ulster on could be cold, even while crossing the Channel, where, as everybody knows, it is possible to be frozen even on a summer's night. He also bought a traveling rug of Scotch tweed.
Then he sauntered into the park till lunch time, when he went back to the club. He knew that no letter could be waiting for him, and yet he could not help glancing inquiringly at the porter, who faintly smiled and respectively shook his head.
One or two acquaintances dropped in while he was eating his lunch at a side table, and they gathered round him and plied him with eager invitations to join them in a driving trip to Richmond; but he shook his head.
"Better come, Auchester," said one young fellow. "Jolly afternoon! Besides, a friend of yours is of the party."
"Who is that?" asked Yorke with polite indifference.
Drive to Richmond when he wanted to be alone to think of Leslie and all that license in his breast coat pocket meant! Not likely.
"Why, Finetta," said the young fellow. "She has promised, if we get her back in time for the theater."
Yorke shook his head, and while he was doing it Lord Vinson strolled up.
"What's that about Finetta and Richmond?" he inquired. "Afraid you'll be disappointed. Just been up there," he drawled. "She's vamoosed the ranche, sloped off somewhere, and isn't going to dance to-night. Know where she's gone, Auchester?"
"No," said Yorke, and he answered very quietly. Poor Fin! was she taking the breaking off of their friendship to heart after all?
"Strikes me Mademoiselle Fin is playing it rather low on an indulgent public!" grumbled the young fellow who had arranged the outing, and as he sauntered off with the rest he remarked in a low voice, "Shouldn't be surprised if Auchester had arranged to take her somewhere; they're awfully thick, you know, and she'd throw over anything for him."
After lunch Yorke went to Bury Street, and with his own hands packed a portmanteau or two.
Then he went back to the club, for though he knew no telegram could have arrived, he felt constrained to be there in waiting, so to speak, and dined quietly and in solitude, and afterwards he walked by the park railings to Notting Hill and round the quiet squares, and was happy thinking of Leslie and the days that lay before them, the delicious, glorious days when they two should be one – man and wife. Man and wife!
He went to bed early that night and slept soundly, so soundly that he was rather later than he meant to be at breakfast, and he hurried over that meal and made his way to the Dorchester with a fast-beating heart.
There might possibly be a telegram for him. But the porter said no, nothing had come for his lordship, and Yorke, too disappointed to make a pretense of looking at the papers, went out and stood on the broad steps and stared up and down Pall Mall.
Arnheim had promised to wire the night Yorke had seen him; there had been time for the Lisles to get up to London, time for Leslie to wire. Well, he would be patient and not worry. But, Heaven and earth, what should he do with himself while he was waiting for that telegram! He was so wrapped up in the thought of meeting his darling that he could not endure the distraction of even exchanging greetings with his acquaintances. He could not go to Finetta's – never again! – or Lady Eleanor's. He wanted to be alone, alone with his thoughts. What should he do? Was there anything else he could buy? As the question crossed his mind the answer flashed upon him and made him almost start. Why, there was the ring! He had not bought that yet. What an idiot he was. Even with a license, you could not be married without a ring. He went straight off to Bond Street, to the jeweler's of whom he had purchased the diamond pendant and the plain gold locket, and stood for a minute or two outside looking at the things in the window.
He would have a keeper as well as a plain wedding ring. He would get the prettiest and 'solidest' they'd got. He gazed at the rows of diamond ornaments, for the first time in his life covetously. Ah, if he were only the Duke of Rothbury, as she thought him, what things he would buy for her! Notwithstanding that, if he were the duke he would have the great Rothbury diamonds, those gems which were supposed to rank next to the Crown jewels, and they would be hers, his duchess's; yet, all the same, he would buy her all sorts of pretty things. As the heathen loves to deck his idol, so he, Yorke, would love to deck his idol with all that this world counted good and precious.
Regarding that masquerade of his, that sailing under false colors, he thought that Leslie would neither be very disappointed nor angry.
"It is me she loves," he told himself with a proudly swelling heart. "And it will not matter what I am or am not. But all the same I wish that idea had not occurred to poor old Dolph."
All this was passing through his mind as he was standing outside the well-known shop in Bond Street. Everybody knows it, and everybody knows that the street is rather narrow just where the shop is situated, and at that moment it happened that one of the many blocks of the day occurred, and that a neatly appointed brougham was brought to a standstill very nearly opposite the jeweler's shop.
It was a charming little brougham, one of those costly toys which only very wealthy people can indulge in. The interior was lined with Russian leather, the cushions of sage plush; there was a clock in ormolu and turquoise and a delightful little reading lamp, fan and scent case, and china what-not basket.
It was the brougham which took the celebrated Finetta to and from the Diadem; the brougham of which the newspapers have given an elaborate account, and in it was no less a personage than Finetta herself. She was leaning back against the eiderdown cushions, her handsome face pale, with purplish rings round her dark eyes. She looked as if she was half worn out by excitement and physical fatigue.
She had been lying with closed eyes till the block and stoppage came, then she opened her eyes and asked listlessly:
"What is it?"
"It's a block," said Polly who sat beside her. "There's a carriage and a butcher's cart in front, a swell carriage – ."