Charles Rex, Ethel May Dell [find a book to read txt] 📗

herself. She had once possessed the key, and she could not believe that it was no longer in her power to turn it. He would surely yield to her though he barred out all beside.
Perhaps he read her thoughts, for the laugh died out of his eyes, melting into the old tender raillery that she remembered so well.
"Will you drink with me?" he said. "You have actually stooped to enter my stronghold without your bodyguard. Will you not honour me still further--partake of my hospitality?"
She smiled at him. "Of course I will have tea with you with pleasure, Charlie. Didn't you realize I was waiting to be asked?"
"You are very gracious," he said, and crossed the room to ring a bell.
She remained in the western turret, looking out over the beech woods that blazed golden in the sun to the darker pine-woods beyond.
"What a paradise this is!" she said, when he joined her again.
His restless eyes followed hers without satisfaction. A certain moodiness had come upon him. He made no answer to her words.
"Why doesn't Bunny come up to see me?" he asked suddenly. "He knows I am here."
She looked at him in surprise. "Are you expecting him?"
He nodded with a touch of arrogance. "Yes. Tell him to come! I shan't quarrel with him or he with me. Is he still thirsting for my blood? He's welcome to it if he wants it."
"Charlie!" she protested.
He turned from her and sat down at the piano. His fingers began to caress the keys, and then in a moment the old sweet melody that he had played to her in the long ago days came softly through the room. Her lips formed the words as he played, but she made no sound.
"There has fallen a splendid tear From the passion-flower at the gate. She is coming, my dove, my dear; She is coming, my life, my fate. The red rose cries, 'She is near, she is near!' And the white rose weeps, 'She is late!' The larkspur listens, 'I hear, I hear!' And the lily whispers, 'I wait!'"
"She is certainly very late," commented Charles Rex quizzically from the piano. "And the lily is more patient than I am. Why don't you sing, Maud of the roses?"
She started a little at his voice, but she did not answer. She could not tell him that her throat was dumb with tears.
He played softly on for a space, then as the old butler entered with a tea-tray, he abruptly left the piano to wait upon her. He made her sit in the window-seat and presently sat down himself and talked of indifferent things. She did not attempt to bring him back to the matter in hand. She knew him too well for that. If he chose to be elusive, no power on earth could capture him.
But she had a strong feeling that he would not seek to elude her wholly. He might seem to trifle, as a monkey swinging idly from bough to bough, but he had an end in view, and ultimately he would reach that end, however circuitous the route.
He surprised her eventually by the suddenness with which he pounced upon it. He had turned the talk upon the subject of his new yacht, and very abruptly he announced his intention of going round the world in her.
"Not alone?" she said, and then would have checked the words lest they should seem to ask too much.
But he answered her without a pause. "Yes, alone. And if I don't come back, Bunny can marry Toby and reign here in my stead. That is, if he isn't an infernal fool. If he is, then Toby can reign here alone--with you and Jake to take care of her."
"But, Charlie, why--why?" The words leapt from Maud in spite of her.
He frowned at her whimsically. "They've always cared for one another. Don't you know it? It's true she put me in a shrine and worshipped me for a time, but I couldn't live up to it. _Figurez-vous, ma chere!_ Myself--a marble saint!"
"You never understood her," Maud said.
He shrugged his shoulders and went lightly on. "Oh, she was ready enough to offer me human sacrifice, but that wasn't enough for me. Besides, I didn't want sacrifice. I have stood between her and the world. I have given her protection. But it was a free gift. I don't take anything in exchange for that." An odd note sounded in his voice, as of some emotion suppressed. He leaned back against the window-frame, his hands behind his head. "That wasn't what I married her for. I tried to prove that to her. I actually thought--" the old derisive grin leapt across his face--"that I could win her trust like any ordinary man. I failed of course--failed hideously. She never expected decent treatment from me. She never even began to trust me. I was far too heavily handicapped for that. And so--as soon as the wind changed--the boat capsized."
"What made the wind change?" Maud asked gently.
He looked across at her, the baffling smile still in his eyes. "The gods played a jest with us," he said. "It was only a small jest, but it turned the scale. She fled. That was how I came to realize I couldn't hold her. I had travelled too fast as usual, and she couldn't keep up. Well," he unlocked his hands and straightened himself, "it's up to Bunny now. I'll let her go--to him."
"My dear!" Maud said.
He laughed at her with the old half-caressing ridicule. "That shocks you? But why--if they love each other? Haven't I heard you preach the gospel of love as the greatest thing on earth? Didn't you once tell me that I had yet to learn the joy--" his smile twisted again--"the overwhelming joy--of setting the happiness of another before one's own? This thing can be done quite simply and easily--as I suggested to you long ago. She has only to go away with him, and I do the rest. A moral crime--no more. Yes, it is against your code of course. But consider! I only stand to lose that which I have never possessed. For the first time in my life, I commit a crime in the name of--love!"
He laughed over the word; yet even through the scoffing sound there came a ring of pain. His face had a drawn look--the wistfulness of the monkey that has seen its prize irrevocably snatched away.
Maud rose quickly. There was something in his attitude or expression that she could not bear. "Oh, you are wrong! You are wrong!" she said. "You have the power to make her love you. And you love her. Charlie, this thing has not been given you to throw away. You can't! You can't!"
He made a sharp gesture that checked her. "My dear Maud," he said, "there are a good many things I can't do, and one of them is this. I can't hold any woman against her will--no, not if she were my wife ten times over. I wouldn't have let her go to Spentoli. But Bunny is a different matter. I have Jake's word for it that he will make her a better husband than I shall. If Bunny wants to know all about her past--her parentage--he can come to me and I can satisfy him. Tell him that! But if he really loves her--he won't care a damn--any more than I do."
"Ah!" Maud said.
She stood a moment, looking at him, and in her eyes was that mother-look of a love that understands. She held out her hand to him.
"Thank you for telling me, Charlie," she said. "Good-bye!"
He held her hand. "What have I told you?" he asked abruptly.
She shook her head. "Never mind now! You have just made me understand, that's all. I will give your message to Bunny--to them both. Good-bye!"
He stooped in his free, gallant way to kiss her hand. "After all," he said, "I return to my old allegiance. It was you, _chere reine_, who taught me how to love."
She gently freed her hand and turned to go. "No," she said. "I think it was God who taught you that."
For the second time Charles Rex failed to utter the scoffing laugh she half-expected. The odd eyes looked after her with a kind of melancholy irony.
"To what purpose?" he said.


CHAPTER XI
THE GIFT OF THE GODS

A chill wind blew across the ramparts bringing with it the scent and the sound of the sea. There was no moon in the sky tonight, only the clouds flying over the stars, obscuring and revealing them alternately, making their light weirdly vague and fitful. Across the park an owl called persistently, its eerie hoot curiously like the cry of a human voice through the rustling night. The trees were murmuring together down by the lake as though some mysterious news were passing to and fro among them. And once more, alone on his castle walls, Saltash paced restlessly up and down.
It was his last night at Burchester, so he told himself, for many a year to come. The fever for change was upon him. He had played his last card and lost. It was characteristic of the man to turn his back upon his losses and be gone. His soul had begun to yearn for the wide spaces, and it was in answer to the yearning that he had come up to this eagle's eyrie a second time. He could not be still, and the feeling of walls around him was somehow unbearable. But he expected no vision tonight. He walked in darkness.
Down in the harbour his yacht was waiting, and he wondered cynically what whim kept him from joining her. Why was he staying to drain the cup to the dregs--he who had the whole world to choose from? He had sent his message, he had made his sacrifice--at what a cost not even Maud would ever know. It was the first voluntary sacrifice he had ever made, he reflected ironically, and he marvelled at himself to find that he cared so much. For, after all, what was it he had sacrificed? Nothing worth having, so he told himself. He had possessed her childish adoration, but her love--never! And, very curiously, it was her love that he had wanted. Actually, for the first time in his life, no lesser thing had appealed to him. Jaded and weary with long experience, he owned now to a longing for that at which all his life long he had scoffed. The longing was not to be satisfied. He was to go empty away. But yet the very fact that he had known it had in some inexplicable fashion purified him from earthly desires. He had as it were reached up and touched the spiritual, and that which was not spiritual had crumbled away below him. He looked back upon the desert through which all his life he had travelled, and saw only sand.
The sound of the turret-door banging behind him recalled him to his surroundings. He awoke to the fact that the wind was chill, and that a drift of rain was coming in from the sea. With an impatient shrug he turned. Why was he lingering here like a drunken reveller at a table of spilt wine? He would go down to his yacht and find Larpent--Larpent who had also loved and lost. They would go out on the turn of the tide--the two losers in the game of life--and leave the spilt wine behind them.
Impulsively he strode back along the ramparts. The game was over, and he would never play again; but at least he would face the issue like a man. No one, not even Larpent, should ever see him