Only a Girl's Love, Charles Garvice [a book to read .txt] 📗

calmly. "If I saw a treasure, some pearl of great price, lying at your feet, and felt that you were passing it by unnoticed and disregarded, should I be wrong in speaking the word[110] that would place it in your grasp? Your happiness is my—life Leycester! If ever there was a treasure, a pearl of great price among women, it is Lenore. Are you passing her by? You will not do that!"

Never, since he could remember, had he seen her so moved. Her voice was calm and even, as usual, but her eyes were warm with an intense earnestness, the diamonds trembled on her neck.

He stood before her, looking away beyond her, a strange trouble at his heart. For the first time he saw—he appreciated, rather—the beautiful girl whom, as it were, she held up to his mental gaze. But that other, that girl-love whose lips still seemed to murmur, "I love you, Leycester!" What of her!

With a sudden start he moved away.

"I do not think you should have spoken," he said. "You cannot know——"

The countess smiled.

"A mother's eyes are quick," she said. "A word and the pearl is at your feet, Leycester."

He was but a man, warm-blooded and impressionable, and for a moment his face flushed, but the "I love you" still rang in his ears.

"If that be so, all the more cause for silence, mother," he said. "But I hope you are mistaken."

"I am not mistaken," she said. "Do you think," and she smiled, "that I should have spoken if I had not been sure? Oh, Leycester," and she moved toward him, "think of her! Is there any beauty so beautiful as hers; is there any one woman you have ever met who possessed a tithe of her charms! Think of her as the head of the house; think of her in my place——"

He put up his hand.

"Think of her," she went on, quickly, "as your own, your very own! Leycester, there is no man born who could turn away from her!"

Almost involuntarily he turned and went to the fireplace, and leant upon it.

"There is no man, who, so turning, but would in time give all that he possessed to come back to her!"

Then her voice changed.

"Leycester, you have been very good. Are you angry?"

"No," he said, and he went to her; "not angry, but—but troubled. You think only of me, but I think of Lenore."

"Think of her still!" she said; "and be sure that I have made no mistake. If you doubt me, put it to the test——"

He started.

"And you will find that I am right. I am going now, Leycester. Good-night!" and she kissed him.

He went to the door and opened it; his face was pale and grave.

"Good-night," he said, gently. "You have given me something to think of with a vengeance," and he forced a smile.

She went out without a word. Her maid was waiting for her in her dressing-room, but she passed into the inner room and[111] sank down in a chair, and for the first time her face was pale, and her eyes anxious.

"It has gone further than I thought," she murmured. "I, who know every look in his eyes, read his secret. But it shall not be. I will save him yet. But how? but how?"

Poor Stella!

Lord Leicester, left alone, fell to pacing the room, his brow bent, his mind in a turmoil.

He loved his mother with a passionate devotion, part and parcel of his nature. Every word she had said had sunk into his mind; he loved her, and he knew her; he knew that she would rather die than give her consent to his marriage with such an one as Stella, pure and good and sweet though she was.

He was greatly troubled, but he stood firm.

"Come what will," he murmured, "I cannot part with her. She is my treasure and pearl of great price, and I have not passed her by. My darling!"

Suddenly, breaking into his reverie, came a knock at the door.

He went to open it but it opened before he could reach it, and Lord Charles walked in.

There was a smile on his handsome, light-hearted face, which barely hid an expression of affectionate sympathy.

"Anything the matter, old man?" he said, closing the door.

"Yes—no—not much—why?" said Leycester, forcing a smile.

"Why!" echoed Lord Charles, thrusting his hands into the huge pockets of his dressing-gown, and eying him with mock reproach. "Can you ask when you remember that my room is exactly underneath yours, and that it sounds as if you had turned this into the den of a traveling menagerie? What are you wearing the carpet out for, Ley?" and he sat down and looked up at the troubled face with that frank sincerity which invites confidence.

"I'm in a fix," said Leycester.

"Come on," said Lord Charles, curtly.

"I can't. You can't help me in this," said Leycester, with a sigh.

Lord Charles rose at once.

"Then I'll go. I wish I could. What have you been doing, Ley?—something to-night, I expect. Never mind; if I can help you, you'll let me know."

Leycester threw him a cigar-case.

"Sit down and smoke, Charlie," he said. "I can't open my mind, but I want to think, and you'll help me. Is it late?"

"Awfully," said Lord Charles with a yawn. "What a jolly evening it has been. I say, Ley, haven't you been carrying it on rather thick with that pretty girl with the dark eyes?"

Leycester paused in his task of lighting a cigar, and looked down at him.

"Which girl?" he said, with a little touch of hauteur in his face.

"The painter's niece," said Lord Charles. "What a beautiful girl she is! Reminds me of a what-do-you-call-it."

"What is that?"

[112]

"A—a gazelle. It's rather a pity that she should be intended for that saucy lawyer fellow."

"What?" asked Lord Leycester, quietly.

"Haven't you heard?" said Lord Charles, grimly. "The fellows were talking about it in the billiard-room."

"About what?" demanded Lord Leycester, still quietly, though his eyes glittered. Stella the common talk of the billiard-room. It was desecration.

"Oh, it was Longford, he knows the man!"

"What man?"

"This Jasper Adelstone she is engaged to."

Lord Leycester held the cigar to his lips, and his teeth closed over it with a sudden fierce passion.

Coming upon all that had passed, this was the last straw.

"It's a lie!" he said.

Lord Charles looked up with a start, then his face grew grave.

"Perhaps so," he said; "but, after all, it can't matter to you, Ley."

Lord Leycester turned away in silence.

CHAPTER XVI.

Jasper Adelstone was in love.

It was some time before he would bring himself to admit it even to himself, for he was wont to pride himself on his superiority to all attacks of the tender passion.

Often and often had he amused himself and his chosen companions by ridiculing the conditions of those weak mortals who allowed themselves to be carried away by what he termed a weak and contemptible affection for the other sex.

Marriage, he used to say, was entirely a matter of business. A man didn't marry until he was obliged, and then only did so to better himself. As to love, and that kind of thing—well, it was an exploded idea—a myth which had died out; at any rate, too absurd a thing altogether for a man possessed of common sense—for such a man, for instance, as Jasper Adelstone. He had seen plenty of pretty women and was received by them with anything but disfavor. He was good-looking, almost handsome, and would have been that if he could have got rid of the sharp, cunning glint of his small eyes; and he was clever and accomplished. He was just the man, it would have been supposed, to fall a victim to the tender passion; but he had stuck fast by his principles, and gone stealthily along the road to success, with his cold smile ready for everyone in general, and not a warm beam in his heart for anyone in particular.

And now! Yes, he was in love—in love as deeply, unreasoningly, as impulsively as the veriest school-boy.

This was very annoying! It would have been very annoying if the object of his passion had been an heiress or the lady of title whom he had in his inmost mind determined to marry, if he married at all; for he would have preferred to have attained to his ambition without any awkward and inconvenient love-making.

[113]

But the girl who had inspired him with this sudden and unreasoning passion was, much to his disgust, neither an heiress nor an offshoot of nobility.

She was a mere nobody—the niece of an obscure painter! She was not even in society!

There was no good to be got by marrying her, none whatever. She could not help him a single step on his ambitious path through life. On the first evening of his meeting with Stella, when the beauty, and, more than her beauty, the nameless charm of her bright, pure freshness, overwhelmed and startled him, he took himself to task very seriously.

"Jasper," he said, "you won't go and make a fool of yourself, I hope! She is entirely out of your line. She is only a pretty girl; you've seen a score, a hundred as pretty, or prettier; and she's a mere nobody! Oh, no, you won't make a fool of yourself—you'll go back to town to-morrow morning."

But he did not go back to town; instead, he went into the conservatory at the Rectory, and made up a bouquet and took it to the cottage, and sank deeper still into the mire of foolishness, as he would have called it.

But even then it was not too late. He might have escaped even then by dint of calling up his selfish nature and thinking of all his ambitions; but Stella unfortunately roused—what was more powerful in him than his sudden love—his self-conceit.

She actually dared to defend Lord Leycester Wyndward!

That was almost the finishing stroke, unwittingly dealt by Stella, and he went away inwardly raging with incipient jealousy.

But the last straw was yet to come that should break the back of all his prudent resolves, and that was the meeting with Stella and Lord Leycester in the river-woods, and Lord Leycester's attack on him.

That moment—the moment when he lay on the ground looking up at the dark, handsome, angry, and somewhat scornful face of the young peer—Jasper Adelstone registered a vow.

He vowed that come what would, by fair means or foul, he would have Stella.

He vowed that he would snatch her from the haughty and fiery young lord who had dared to hurl him, Jasper, to the dust and insult him.

What love he already possessed for her suddenly sprang up into a fierce flame of jealous passion, and as he rode home to the Rectory he repeated that vow several times, and at once, without the loss of an hour, began to hunt about for some means to fulfill it.

He was no fool, this Jasper Adelstone, for all his conceit, and he knew the immense odds against him if Lord Leycester really meant anything by his attention to Stella; he knew what fearful advantages Leycester held—all the Court cards were in his hands. He was handsome, renowned, noble, wealthy—a suitor whom the highest in the land would think twice about before refusing.

He almost guessed, too, that Stella already loved Leycester;[114] he had seen her face turned to the young lord—had heard her voice as she spoke to him.

He ground his teeth together with vicious rage as he thought of the difference between her way of speaking to him and to Leycester.

"But she shall speak to me, look at me like that before the game is over," he swore to himself. "I can afford to wait for my opportunity; it will come, and I shall know how to use it. Curse him! Yes, I am determined now. I will take him from her."

It was a bold, audacious resolution; but then Jasper was both bold and audacious in the most dangerous of ways, in the cold, calculating manner of a cunning, unscrupulous man.

He was clever—undoubtedly clever; he had been very successful, and had made that success by his own unaided efforts. Already, young as he was, he was beginning to be talked about. When people were in any great difficulty in his branch of the law, they went to him, sure of finding him cool, ready, and capable.

His chambers in the inn held a little museum of secrets—secrets about persons of rank and standing, who were supposed to be quite free from such inconvenient things as skeletons in cupboards.

People came to him when they were in any social fix; when they owed more money than they could pay; when they wanted a divorce, or were anxious to hush up some secret, whose threatened disclosure involved shame and disgrace, and Jasper Adelstone was always ready with sound advice,