Phantom Fortune, Mary Elizabeth Braddon [free e novels .txt] 📗

predestined to conquer fate.'

'But we should have to begin from the beginning.'

'Yes, we should have to begin from the beginning, as Adam and Eve did when they left Paradise.'

'We are not told in the Bible that they had any happiness after that. It seems to have been all trouble and weariness, and toil and death, after the angel with the flaming sword drove them out of Eden.'

'They were together, and they must have been happy. Oh, Lesbia, if you do not feel that you can face poverty and the world's contempt by my side, and for my sake, you do not love me. Love never calculates so nicely; love never fears the future; and yet you do love me, Lesbia,' he said, trying to fold her in his arms; but again she drew herself away from him--this time with a look almost of horror--and stood facing him, clinging to one of the pine trunks, like a scared wood-nymph.

'You have no right to say that,' she said.

'I have the divine right of my own deep love--of heart which cries out to heart. Do you think there is no magnetic power in true love which can divine the answering love in another? Lesbia, call me an insolent coxcomb if you like, but I know you love me, and that you and I may be utterly happy together. Oh, why--why do you shrink from me, my beloved; why withhold yourself from my arms! Oh, love, let me hold you to my heart--let me seal our betrothal with a kiss!'

'Betrothal--no, no; not for the world,' cried Lesbia. 'Lady Maulevrier would cast me off for ever; she would curse me.'

'What would the curse of an ambitious woman weigh against my love? And I tell you that her anger would be only a passing tempest. She would forgive you.'

'Never--you don't know her.'

'I tell you she would forgive you, and all would be well with us before we had been married a year. Why cannot you believe me, Lesbia?'

'Because I cannot believe impossibilities, even from your lips,' she answered sullenly.

She stood before him with downcast eyes, the tears streaming down her pale cheeks, exquisitively lovely in her agitation and sorrow. Yes, she did love him; her heart was beating passionately; she was longing to throw herself on his breast, to be folded upon that manly heart, in trust in that brave, bright look which seemed to defy fortune. Yes, he was a man born to conquer; he was handsome, intellectual, powerful in all mental and physical gifts. A man of men. But he was, by his own admission, a very obscure and insignificant person, and he had no money. Life with him meant a long fight with adverse circumstances; life for his wife must mean patience, submission, long waiting upon destiny, and perhaps with old age and grey hairs the tardy turning of Fortune's wheel. And was she for this to resign the kingdom that had been promised to her, the giddy heights which she was born to scale, the triumphs and delights and victories of the great world? Yes, Lesbia loved this fortuneless knight; but she loved herself and her prospects of promotion still better.

'Oh, Lesbia, can you not be brave for my sake--trustful for my sake? God will be good to us if we are true to each other.'

'God will not be good to me if I disobey my grandmother. I owe her too much; ingratitude in me would be doubly base. I will speak to her. I will tell her all you have said, and if she gives me the faintest encouragement----'

'She will not; that is a foregone conclusion. Tell her all, if you like; but let us be prepared for the answer. When she denies the right of your heart to choose its own mate, then rise up in the might of your womanhood and defy her. Tell her, "I love him, and be he rich or poor, I will share his fate;" tell her boldly, bravely, nobly, as a true woman should; and if she be adamant still, proclaim your right to disobey her worldly wisdom rather than the voice of your own heart. And then come to me, darling, and be my own, and the world which you and I will face together shall not be a bad world. I will answer for that. No trouble shall come near you. No humiliation shall ever touch you. Only believe in me.'

'I can believe in you, but not in the impossible,' answered Lesbia, with measured accents.

The voice was silver-sweet, but passing cold. Just then there was a rustling among the pine branches, and Lesbia looked round with a startled air.

'Is there any one listening?' she exclaimed. 'What was that?'

'Only the breath of heaven. Oh, Lesbia, if you were but a little less wise, a little more trustful. Do not be a dumb idol. Say that you love me, or do not love me. If you can look me in the face and say the last, I will leave you without another word. I will take my sentence and go.'

But this was just what Lesbia could not do. She could not deny her love; and yet she could not sacrifice all things for her love. She lifted the heavy lids which veiled those lovely eyes, and looked up at him imploringly.

'Give me time to breathe, time to think,' she said.

'And then will you answer me plainly, truthfully, without a shadow of reserve, remembering that the fate of two lives hangs on your words.'

'I will.'

'Let it be so, then. I'll go for a ramble over the hills, and return in time for afternoon tea. I shall look for you on the tennis lawn at half-past four.'

He took her in his arms, and this time she yielded herself to him, and the beautiful head rested for a few moments upon his breast, and the soft eyes looked up at him in confiding fondness. He bent and kissed her once only, but a kiss that meant for life and death. In the next moment he was gone, leaving her alone among the pine trees.


CHAPTER XI.


'IF I WERE TO DO AS ISEULT DID.'

Lady Maulevrier rarely appeared at luncheon. She took some slight refection in her morning-room, among her books and papers, and in the society of her canine favourites, whose company suited her better at certain hours than the noisier companionship of her grandchildren. She was a studious woman, loving the silent life of books better than the inane chatter of everyday humanity. She was a woman who thought much and read much, and who lived more in the past than the present. She lived also in the future, counting much upon the splendid career of her beautiful granddaughter, which should be in a manner a lengthening out, a renewal of her own life. She looked forward to the day when Lesbia should reign supreme in the great world, a famous beauty and leader of fashion, her every act and word inspired and directed by her grandmother, who would be the shadow behind the throne. It was possible--nay, probable--that in those days Lady Maulevrier would herself re-appear in society, establish her salon, and draw around her closing years all that is wittiest, best, and wisest in the great world.

Her ladyship was reposing in her low reading-chair, with a volume of Tyndall on the book-stand before her, when the door was opened softly and Lesbia came gliding in, and seated herself without a word on the hassock at her grandmother's feet. Lady Maulevrier passed her hand caressingly over the girl's soft brown hair, without looking up from her book.

'You are a late visitor,' she said; 'why did you not come to me after breakfast?'

'It was such a lovely morning, we went straight from the breakfast table to the garden; I did not think you wanted me.'

'I did not want you; but I am always glad to see my pet. What were you doing in the garden all the morning? I did not hear you playing tennis.'

Lady Maulevrier had already interrogated the German governess upon this very subject, but she had her own reasons for wishing to hear Lesbia's account.

'No, it was too warm for tennis. Fräulein and I sat and worked, and Mr. Hammond read to us.'

'What did he read?'

'Heine's ballads. He reads German beautifully.

'Indeed! I daresay he was at school in Germany. There are cheap schools there to which middle-class people send their boys.'

This was like a thrust from a rusty knife.

'Mr. Hammond was at Oxford,' Lesbia said, reproachfully; and then, after a longish pause, she clasped her hands upon the arm of Lady Maulevrier's chair, and said, in a pleading voice, 'Grandmother, Mr. Hammond has asked me to marry him.'

'Indeed! Only that? And pray, did he tell you what are his means of maintaining Lord Maulevrier's sister in the position to which her birth entitles her?' inquired the dowager, with crushing calmness.

'He is not rich; indeed, I believe, he is poor; but he is brave and clever, and he is full of confidence in his power to conquer fortune.'

'No doubt; that is your true adventurer's style. He confides implicitly in his own talents, and in somebody else's banker. Mr. Hammond would make a tremendous figure in the world, I daresay, and while he was making it your brother would have to keep him. Well, my dear Lesbia, I hope you gave this gentleman the answer his insolence deserved; or that you did better, and referred him to me. I should be glad to give him my opinion of his conduct--a person admitted to this house as your brother's hanger-on--tolerated only on your brother's account; such a person, nameless, penniless, friendless (except for Maulevrier's too facile patronage), to dare to lift his eyes to my granddaughter! It is ineffable insolence!'

Lesbia crouched by her grandmother's chair, her face hidden from Lady Maulevrier's falcon eye. Every word uttered by her ladyship stung like the knotted cords of a knout. She knew not whether to be most ashamed of her lover or of herself--of her lover for his obscure position, his hopeless poverty; of herself for her folly in loving such a man. And she did love him, and would fain have pleaded his cause, had she not been cowed by the authority that had ruled her all her life.

'Lesbia, if I thought you had been silly enough, degraded enough, to give this young man encouragement, to have justified his audacity of to-day by any act or word of yours, I should despise, I should detest you,' said Lady Maulevrier, sternly. 'What could be more contemptible, more hateful in a girl reared as you have been than to give encouragement to the first comer--to listen greedily to the first adventurer who had the insolence to make love to you, to be eager to throw yourself into the arms of the first man who asked you. That my granddaughter, a girl reared and taught and watched and guarded by me, should have no more dignity, no more modesty, or womanly feeling, than a barmaid at an inn!'

Lesbia began to cry.

'I don't see why a barmaid, should not be a good woman, or why it should be a crime to fall in love,' she said, in a voice broken by sobs. 'You need not speak to me so unkindly. I am not going to marry Mr. Hammond.'

'Oh, you are not? that is very good of you.