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

its object was at stake!"

Stella put up her hand to silence him.

"I do not care—I will not listen to your fine phrases. They do not move me, Mr. Adelstone. To your devotion and—and attachment I am indifferent; I refuse to accept them. I await[195] your explanations. If you have none to give, I will go," and she made a movement as if to depart.

"Wait, I implore, I advise you."

Stella stopped.

"Hear me to the end," he said. "You will not permit me to allude to the passionate love which is my excuse and my warranty for what I have done. So be it. I will speak of it no more, if I can so control myself as to refrain from doing so. I will speak of yourself and—and of the man who plots your ruin."

Stella opened her lips, but refrained from speech, and merely smiled a smile of pitiless scorn.

"I speak of Lord Leycester Wyndward," said Jasper Adelstone, the name leaving his lips as if every word tortured them. "It is true, is it not, that this Lord Leycester has asked you to meet him at a place in London—at Bruton Street, his lodgings? It is true that he has told you that he was prepared to make you his wife!"

"And you will say that it is a lie, and ask me to believe you—you against him!" she broke in, with a laugh that cut him like a whip.

"No," he said; "I will admit that it may be true—I think that it is possible that it may be true; and yet, you see, I have braved your wrath and, far worse, your scorn, and balked him."

"For a time," she said, almost beneath her breath—"for a time, a short time. I fear, Mr. Adelstone, that he will demand reparation, heavy reparation at your hands for such 'balking.'"

To save her life she could not have suppressed her threat.

"I do not fear Lord Leycester, or any man," he said. "Where you are concerned I fear only—yourself."

"Do you intend giving me the explanation, sir?" she demanded, impetuously.

"I have stepped in between him and his prey," he went on, still gravely, "because I thought, I hoped, that were time given you, though it were at the last moment, that you would see the danger which lay before you, and draw back."

"Thanks!" she said, scornfully—"that is your explanation. Having afforded it, be kind enough to open that door and let me depart."

"Stay!" he said, and for the first time his voice broke and showed signs of the storm that was raging within him. "Stay, Stella—I implore, I beseech of you! Think, consider for one moment to what doom your feet are carrying you! The man proposes—has the audacity to propose—a clandestine elopement, a secret marriage; he treats you as if you were not worthy to be his wife, as if you were the dirt under his feet! Do you think, dare you, blinded as you are by a momentary passion, dare you hope that any good can spring from such an union, that any happiness can follow such a shameful marriage? Dare you hope that this man's love—love!—which will not brave the temporary anger and contempt of his relations, can be strong enough to last a lifetime? Think, Stella! He is ashamed of you already;[196] he, the heir to Wyndward, is ashamed to make you his bride before the world. He must lower and degrade you by a secret ceremony. What is his love compared with mine—with mine?" and in the fierce emotion of the moment he put his hand upon her arm and held her.

With a fierce, angry scorn, which no one who knew Stella Etheridge could have thought her capable of, she flung his hand from her and confronted him, her beautiful face looking lovely in its scorn and wrath.

"Silence!" she exclaimed, her breast heaving, her eyes darting lightning. "You—you coward! You dare to speak thus to me, a weak, defenseless girl, whom you have entrapped into listening to you! I dare you to utter them to him—him, the man you traduce and slander. You speak of love; you know not what it is! You speak of shame——" she paused, the word seemed to overcome her. "Shame," she repeated, struggling for breath and composure; "you do not know what that is. Shall I tell you? I have never felt it until now; I feel it now, because I have been weak enough to remain and listen to you! It is shameful that your hand should have touched me! It is shameful that I should have listened to your protestations of love—love! You speak of the shame which he would bring upon me! Well, then—listen for once and all!—if such shame were to befall me from his hand, I would go to meet it, yes, and welcome it, rather than take from yours all the honor which you could extend to me! You say that I am going to ruin and unhappiness! So be it; I accept your words—to silence you, learn from my own lips that I would rather bear such shame and misery with him, than happiness and honor with you. Have I—have I," she panted, "spoken plainly enough?" and she looked down at him with passionate scorn. He was white, white as death, his hands hung at his side clinched and burning; his tongue seemed to cleave to the roof of his mouth, and render speech impossible.

Her scorn lashed him; every word fell like the thong of a knout, and cut into his heart; and all the while his eyes rested on hers with anguished entreaty.

"Spare me," he cried, hoarsely, at last. "Spare me! I have tried to spare you!"

"You—spare me!" she retorted, with a short contemptuous laugh.

"Yes," he said, wetting his lips, "I have tried to spare you! I tried argument, entreaty, all to no purpose! Now—now you compel me to use force!"

She glanced at the door, though she seemed to know instinctively that he did not mean physical force.

"I would have saved you without this last step," he said, slowly, almost inaudibly. "I call upon you to remember this in the after-time. That not until you had repulsed all my efforts to turn you from your purpose—not until you had lashed me with your scorn and contempt, did I take up this last weapon. If in using it—though I use it as mercifully as I can—it turns[197] and wounds you, bear this in mind, that not until the last did I direct it against you!"

Stella put her hand to her lips; they were trembling with excitement.

"I will not hear another word," she said. "I care as little for your threat—this is a threat——"

"It is a threat," he said, with deadly calmness.

"As I do for your entreaties. You cannot harm me."

"No," he said; "but I can harm those you love."

She smiled, and moved to the door.

"Stay," he said. "For their sakes, remain and hear me to the end."

She paused.

"You speak of shame," he said, "and fear it as naught. You do not know what it means, and—and—I forget the fearful words that stained your lips. But there are others, those you love, for whom shame means death—worse than death."

She looked at him with a smile of contemptuous disbelief. She did not believe one word of the vague threat, not one word.

"Believe me," he said, "there hangs above the heads of those you love a shame as deadly and awful as that sword which hung above the head of Damocles. It hangs by a single thread which I, and I alone, can sever. Say but the word and I can cast aside that shame. Turn from me to him—to him—and I cut the thread and the sword falls!"

Stella laughed scornfully.

"You have mistaken your vocation," she said. "You were intended for the stage, Mr. Adelstone. I regret that I have no further time to waste upon your efforts. Permit me to go."

"Go, then," he said, "and the misery of those dear to you be upon your hands, for you will have dealt it, not I! Go! But mark me, before you have reached the man who has ensnared you that shame will have fallen; a shame so bitter that it will yawn like a gulf between you and him; a gulf which no time can ever bridge over."

"It—it is a lie!" she breathed, her eyes fixed upon his white face, but she paused and did not go.

He inclined his head.

"No," he said, "it is true, an awful, shameful truth. You will wait and listen?"

She looked at him for a moment in silence.

"I will wait five minutes—just five minutes," she said, and she pointed to the clock. "And I warn you—it is I who warn you now—that by no word will I attempt to screen you from the punishment which will meet this lie."

"I am content," he said, and there was something in the cold tone of assured triumph that struck to her heart.

CHAPTER XXIX.

"Five minutes!" said Stella, warningly; and she turned her face from him, and kept her eyes fixed on the clock.

"It will suffice," said Jasper. "I have to ask you to bear with[198] me while I tell you a short history. I will mention no names—you yourself will be able to supply them. All I have to ask of you further is that you will hear me to the end. The history is of father and son."

Stella did not move; she thought that he referred to the earl and Leycester. She had determined to listen calmly until the five minutes were expired, and then to go—to go without a word.

"The father was an eminent painter"—Stella started slightly, but kept her eyes fixed on the clock—"a man who was highly gifted, of a rare and noble mind, and possessed of undeniable genius. Even as a young man his gifts were meeting with acknowledgment. He married a woman above him in station, beautiful, and fashionable, but altogether unworthy of him. As might have been expected, the marriage turned out ill. The wife, having nothing in common with her high-souled husband, plunged into the world, and was swallowed up in its vortex. I do not wish to speak of her further; she brought him shame."

Stella paled to the lips.

"Shame so deep that he cast aside his ambition and left the world. Casting away his old life, and separating himself entirely from it—separating himself from the child which the woman who had betrayed him had born to him—he settled in a remote country village, forgotten and effaced. The son was brought up by guardians appointed by the father, who could never bring himself to see him. This boy went to school, to college, was launched, so to speak, on the world without a father's care. The evil results which usually follow such a starting followed here. The boy, left to himself, or at best to the hired guardianship of a tutor, plunged into life. He was a handsome, high-spirited boy, and found, as is usual, ready companionship. Folly—I will not say vice—worked its usual charm; the boy, alone and uncared for, was led astray. In an unthinking moment he committed a crime——"

Stella, white and breathless, turned upon him.

"It is false!" she breathed.

He looked at her steadily.

"Committed a crime. It was done unthinkingly, on the spur of the moment; but it was done irrevocably. The punishment for the crime was a heavy one—he was doomed to spend the best part of his life as a convict——"

Stella moaned and put up her hand to her eyes.

"It is not true."

"Doomed to a felon's expiation. Think of it. A handsome, high-born, high-spirited, perhaps gifted lad, doomed to a felon's, a convict's fate! Can you not picture him, working in chains, clad in yellow, branded with shame——"

Stella leaned against the door, and hid her face.

"It is false—false!" she moaned; but she felt that it was true.

"From that doom—one—one whom you have lashed with your scorn—stepped forward to save him."

"You?"

[199]

"I," he said—"even I!"

She turned to him slightly.

"You did this?"

He inclined his head.

"I did it," he repeated. "But for me he would be, at this moment, working out his sentence, the just sentence of the outraged law."

Stella was silent, regarding him with eyes distended with horror.

"And he—he knew it?" she murmured, brokenly.

"No," he said. "He did not know it; he does not know it even now."

Stella breathed a sigh, then shuddered as she remembered how the boy Frank had insulted and scorned this silent, inflexible man, who had saved him from a felon's fate.

"He did not know it!" she said. "Forgive him!"

He smiled a strange smile.

"The lad is nothing to me," he said. "I have nothing to forgive. One does not feel angered at the attack of a gnat; one brushes the insect off, or lets it remain as the case may be. This lad is nothing to