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

knew all about it, I've no doubt: but the wretch ran away with me in my sleep.'

'I am glad, for your own self-respect, that you had no hand in this disgraceful business,' replied Maulevrier; and then turning to Lord Hartfield, he said, 'Hartfield, will you tell my sister who and what this man is? Will you make her understand what kind of pitfall she has escaped? Upon my soul, I cannot speak of it.'

'I recognise no right of Lord Hartfield's to interfere with my actions, and I will hear nothing that he may have to say,' said Lesbia, standing by her lover's side, with head erect and eyes dark with anger.

'Your sister's husband has the strongest right to control your actions, Lady Lesbia, when the family honour is at stake,' answered Hartfield, with grave authority. 'Accept me at least as a member of your family, if you will not accept me as your disinterested and devoted friend.'

'Friend!' echoed Lesbia, scornfully. 'You might have been my friend once. Your friendship then would have been of some value to me, if you had told me the truth, instead of approaching me with a lie upon your lips. You talk of honour, Lord Hartfield; you, who came to my grandmother's house as an impostor, under a false name!'

'I went there as a man standing on his own merits, assuming no rank save that which God gave him among his fellow-men, claiming to be possessed of no fortune except intellect and industry. If I could not win a wife with such credentials, it were better for me never to marry at all, Lady Lesbia. But we have no time to speak of the past. I am here as your brother's friend, here to save you.'

'To part me from the man to whom I have given my heart. That you cannot do. Gomez, why do you not speak? Tell him, tell him!' cried Lesbia, with a voice strangled by sobs; 'tell him that I am to be your wife to-morrow, at Havre. Your wife!'

'Dear Lady Lesbia, that cannot be,' said Lord Hartfield, sorrowfully, pitying her in her helplessness, as he might have pitied a young bird in the fowler's net. 'I am assured upon undeniable authority that Señor Montesma has a wife living at Cuba; and even were this not so--were he free to marry you--his character and antecedents would for ever forbid such a marriage.'

'A wife! No, no, no!' shrieked Lesbia, looking wildly from one to the other. 'It is a lie--a lie, invented by my brother, who always hated me--by you, who fooled and deceived me! It is a lie, an infamous invention! Don Gomez, speak to them: for pity's sake answer them! Don't you see that they are driving me mad?'

She flung herself into his arms, she buried her dishevelled head upon his breast; she clung to him with hands that writhed convulsively in her agony.

Maulevrier sprang across the cabin and wrenched her from her lover's grasp.

'You shall not pollute her with your touch,' he cried; 'you have poisoned her mind already. Scoundrel, seducer, slave-dealer! Do you hear, Lesbia? Shall I tell you what this man is--what trade he followed yonder, on his native island--this Spanish hidalgo--this all-accomplished gentleman--lineal descendant of the Cid--fine flower of Andalusian chivalry? It was not enough for him to cheat at cards, to float bubble companies, bogus lotteries. His profligate extravagance, his love of sybarite luxury, required a larger resource than the petty schemes which enrich smaller men. A slave ship, which could earn nearly twenty thousand pounds on every voyage, and which could make two runs in a year--that was the trade for Don Gomez de Montesma, and he carried it on merrily for six or seven years, till the British cruisers got too keen for him, and the good old game was played out. You see that scar upon the hilalgo's forehead, Lesbia--a token of knightly prowess, you think, perhaps. No, my girl, that is the mark of an English cutlass in a scuffle on board a slaver. A merry trade, Lesbia--the living cargo stowed close under hatches have rather a bad time of it now and then--short rations of food and water, yellow Jack. They die like rotten sheep sometimes--bad then for the dealer. But if he can land the bulk of his human wares safe and sound the profits are enormous. The Captain-General takes his capitation fee, the blackies are drafted off to the sugar plantations, and everybody is satisfied; but I think, Lesbia, that your British prejudices would go against marriage with a slave-trader, were he ever so free to make you his wife, which this particular dealer in blackamoors is not.'

'Is this true, this part of their vile story?' demanded Lesbia, looking at her lover, who stood apart from them all now, his arms folded, his face deadly pale, the lower lip quivering under the grinding of his strong white teeth.

'There is some truth in it,' he answered, hoarsely. 'Everybody in Cuba had a finger in the African trade, before your British philanthropy spoiled it. Mr. Smithson made sixty thousand pounds in that line. It was the foundation of his fortune. And yet he had his misfortunes in running his cargo--a ship burnt, a freight roasted alive. There are some very black stories in Cuba against poor Smithson. He will never go there again.'

'Mr. Smithson may be a scoundrel; indeed, I believe he is a pretty bad specimen in that line,' said Lord Hartfield. 'But I doubt if there is any story that can be told of him quite so bad as the history of your marriage, and the events that went before it. I have been told the story of the beautiful Octoroon, who loved and trusted you, who shared your good and evil fortunes for the most desperate years of your life, was almost accepted as your wife, and whose strangled corpse was found in the harbour while the bells were ringing for your marriage with a rich planter's heiress--the lady who, no doubt, now patiently awaits your return to her native island.'

'She will wait a long time,' said Montesma, 'or fare ill if I go back to her. Lesbia, his lordship's story of the Octoroon is a fable--an invention of my Cuban enemies, who hate us old Spaniards with a poisonous hatred. But this much is true. I am a married man--bound, fettered by a tie which I abhor. Our Havre marriage would have been bigamy on my part, a delusion on yours. I could not have taken you to Cuba. I had planned our life in a fairer, more civilised world. I am rich enough to have surrounded you with all that makes life worth living. I would have given you love as true and as deep as ever man gave to woman. All that would have been wanting would have been the legality of the tie: and as law never yet made a marriage happy which lacked the elements of bliss, our lawless union need not have missed happiness. Lesbia, you said that you would hold by me, come what might. The worst has come, love; but it leaves me not the less your true lover.'

She looked at him with wild despairing eyes, and then, with a hoarse strange cry, rushed from the cabin, and up the companion, with a desperate swiftness which seemed like the flight of a bird. Montesma, Hartfield, Maulevrier, all followed her, heedless of everything except the dire necessity of arresting her flight. Each in his own mind had divined her purpose.

They were not too late. It was Hartfield's strong arm that caught her, held her as in a vice, dragged her away from the edge of the deck, just where there was a space open to the waves. Another instant and she would have flung herself overboard. She fell back into Lord Hartfield's arms, with a wild choking cry: 'Let me go! Let me go!' Another moment, and a flood of crimson stained his shirt-front, as she lay upon his breast, with closed eyelids and blood-bedabbled lips, in blessed unconsciousness.

They carried her on to the steam-yacht, and down to the cabin, where there was ample accommodation and some luxury, although not the elegance of Bond Street upholstery. Rilboche, Lady Kirkbank, Kibble, luggage of all kinds were transferred from one yacht to the other, even to the vellum bound Keats which lay face downwards on the deck, just where Lesbia had flung it when the _Cayman_ was boarded. The crew of the steam-yacht _Philomel_ helped in the transfer: there were plenty of hands, and the work was done quickly; while the Meztizoes, Yucatekes, Caribs, or whatever they were, looked on and grinned; and while Montesma stood leaning against the mast, with folded arms and sombre brow, a cigarette between his lips.

When the women and all their belongings were on board the _Philomel_, Lord Hartfield addressed himself to Montesma.

'If you consider yourself entitled to call me to account for this evening's work you know where to find me,' he said.

Montesma shrugged his shoulders, and threw away his cigarette with a contemptuous gesture.

_'Ce n'est pas la peine,'_ he said; 'I am a dead shot, and should be pretty sure to send a bullet through you if you gave me the chance; but I should not be any nearer winning her if I killed you: and it is she and she only that I want. You may think me an adventurer--swindler--gambler--slave-dealer--what you will--but I love her as I never thought to love a woman, and I should have been true as steel, if she had been plucky enough to trust me. But, as I told her an hour ago, women have not lion hearts. They can talk tall while the sky is clear and the sun shines, but at the first crack of thunder--_va te promener_.'

'If you have killed her--' began Hartfield.

'Killed her! No. Some small bloodvessel burst in the agitation of that terrible scene. She will be well in a week, and she will forget me. But I shall not forget her. She is the one flower that has sprung on the barren plain of my life. She was my Picciola.'

He turned his back on Lord Hartfield and walked to the other end of the deck. Something in his face, in the vibration of his deep voice, convinced Hartfield of his truth. A bad man undoubtedly--steeped to the lips in evil--and yet so far true that he had passionately, deeply, devotedly loved this one woman.

It was the dead of night when Lesbia recovered consciousness, and even then she lay silent, taking no heed of those around her, in a state of utter prostration. Kibble nursed her carefully, tenderly, all through the night; Maulevrier hardly left the cabin, and Lady Kirkbank, always more or less a victim to the agonies of sea-sickness, still found time to utter lamentations and wailings over the ruin of her protégée's fortune.

'Never had a girl such a chance,' she moaned. 'Quite the best match in society. The house in Park Lane alone cost a fortune. Her diamonds would have been the finest in London.'

'They would have been stained with the blood of the niggers he traded in out yonder,' answered Maulevrier. 'Do you think I would have let my sister marry a slave-dealer?'

'I don't believe a syllable of it,' protested Lady Kirkbank, dabbing her brow with a handkerchief steeped in eau de Cologne. 'A vile fabrication of Montesma's, who wanted to blacken poor Smithson's character in order to extenuate his own crimes.'

'Well, we won't go into that question,' said Maulevrier wearily. 'The Smithson match is off, anyhow; and it matters