A Mad Marriage, May Agnes Fleming [best big ereader .TXT] 📗

bore him off in triumph.

 

“Lady Dynely, permit me—the artist whose picture you so greatly admire,

Mr. Locksley. Mr. Locksley—Miss Forrester.”

 

Both ladies bowed graciously. Lady Dynely addressed him.

 

“It is the gem of the collection—but Mr. Locksley must be weary of

hearing that,” she said.

 

“An artist never wearies of such pleasant flattery,” Mr. Locksley

smilingly answered; “and whether false or true, the flattery is equally

sweet.”

 

“And like all sweets unwholesome,” said Miss Forrester with her frank

laugh, “so we will spare you. But it is wonderful—wonderful—that

woman’s face. Where did you find your model, Mr. Locksley?”

 

“The face—the whole picture—is painted from memory,” was his answer,

very gravely made.

 

The moment he had spoken first, Lady Dynely had turned, and looked him

full in the face. What was there in his voice and face so oddly

familiar? That face, bronzed and bearded, was not like any face she

knew, yet still—. He stood talking to France Forrester, while she

thoughtfully gazed, striving in vain to place him.

 

“How goes the enemy?” Terry cried, pulling out his watch; “ten minutes

of five. Lady Dynely, there was talk of a Keswick flower show—”

 

“And we are overdue—we must go instantly, France. Mr. Locksley, let me

congratulate you once more on your success—I am sure it is but the

forerunner of even greater things. I have some examples of the old

Italian school, which I shall be very happy to show you, if you care to

see them. I am at home every Thursday evening to receive my friends.”

She gave him her card, and took Mr. Dennison’s arm. Miss Forrester

murmured some last, gracious words, bowed with easy grace, and moved

away with her friends.

 

“How your ladyship stared,” was her remark, as they entered the barouche

and were whirled away; “have you ever met this Mr. Locksley before?”

 

“I have never met Mr. Locksley before, I am quite sure,” her ladyship

answered; “it is not a face to be easily forgotten. It is a striking

face.”

 

“A very striking face,” Miss Forrester agrees decidedly. “He reminds you

of some one, possibly?”

 

She hesitates a moment—then answers:

 

“Of one who must have died, in exile, years ago. When he spoke first, it

was the very voice of Gordon Caryll.”

 

CHAPTER II.

 

TERRY.

 

At the window of one of her private rooms, Lucia, Lady Dynely, sits in

deep and painful thought. The fair, smooth brow is knit, the delicate

lips are compressed, an anxious worried light is in her pale-blue eyes.

It is Thursday evening; she is dressed early for her reception, and in

her flowing silks and soft, rich laces, looks a very fair patrician

picture. But the slender, ringed hands are closely locked, as in

physical pain; mentally or bodily, you can see, she suffers as she sits

here.

 

The twilight of the May day is closing—a soft primrose light fills the

western sky—a faint young moon lifts its slender sickle and pearly

light over the Belgravian chimney-pots—a few stars cluster in the blue.

A silvery haze hangs over the streets—the “pea-soup” atmosphere of

dingy London is softly clear for once, and the gloomy grandeur of these

West End stuccoed palaces is tenderly toned down. The room in which Lady

Dynely sits is her sleeping room, an apartment as beautiful and elegant

as wealth and taste can make a room. About it, however, there is this

noticeable—there is but one picture. That picture is a portrait,

painted en buste—it is as though that portrait were held so dear no

other picture must be its companion. It is a portrait of Eric Alexis

Albert, Lord Viscount Dynely, and twenty-first Baron Camperdown.

 

You pause involuntarily and look at his pictured face; it is one that at

any time or in any place must strike the most casual observer, if only

for its beauty. Either the artist has most grossly flattered his

subject, or Eric, Viscount Dynely, is an uncommonly handsome man. The

face is beautiful—with the beauty of a woman—its great drawback that

very womanliness. The curling hair is golden, the eyes sapphire blue to

their deepest depths, the features faultless, the smiling mouth sweet

and weak as a girl’s. There in its nook of honor this portrait hangs

by night and day in Lady Dynely’s room, the last object her eyes look on

at night, the first that greets them when they open to the new day. He

is her idol—it is not too much to say that—her hope—the very life of

her life. At present he is abroad, has been for over a year, and is

expected home now daily. His majority comes in August, and it is to be

celebrated down at Dynely with feasting and rejoicing, with the slaying

of huge bullocks, and the broaching of mighty vats of ale.

 

But to-night in the misty May gloaming it is not altogether of her

darling and her idol my lady sits thinking. Surely all thoughts of him

should be bright and pleasant—is not his majority at hand—is he not to

marry her pet, France Forrester, and live happy ever after? But the

thoughts she thinks as she muses here are neither pleasant nor bright.

 

All her life long, Lady Dynely has been a weak woman, timid and

vacillating, good, gentle, charitable, but wanting “back bone.” Her son

inherits that want. You may see it in his smiling, painted face. Her

mind drifts about irresolutely now. She thinks, first of all, of the

grave, bearded artist, met yesterday in the Royal Academy.

 

How like these deep grave eyes to other eyes, passed forever out of her

world—how like and yet how unlike. How like the voice—deeper, graver

in its timbre, and still the same. Even a slight trick of manner,

characteristic of Gordon Caryll, in shaking impatiently back his fair

hair, this artist had. It was odd, it was almost painful, this passing

likeness, and yet it made her well disposed toward this Mr. Locksley,

made her absolutely anxious lest he should fail to put in an appearance

at her reception to-night.

 

Gordon Caryll! all at once as she sits here, that long ago moonlight

night is before her again. She sees the huge fish-pond, a sheet of

silver light at their feet; she sees his tall figure casting its long

shadow on the velvet sward, sees herself, pale and shivering, clinging

to his arm, as she listens to that sombre story of man’s reckless

passion and woman’s shameful deceit. Again his hands clasp her own,

again his farewell sounds in her ears.

 

“I will take nothing—not even my name. I leave it behind with all the

rest when I sail for India next week.”

 

He had gone; and far away under the burning Indian sky, six feet of

ground held perhaps what had once been the cousin she loved.

 

“Ah, poor Gordon!” she sighs, and then for a while her train of thought

breaks, and there is a blank.

 

It is taken up again; that same night and her husband’s death-bed is

before her. The dimly-lighted chamber of the inn, the man wounded unto

death, and she kneeling beside him, listening to his dying words. Dying

words so dreadful to hear, that, in the soft warmth of her room now, she

shivers from head to foot as she recalls them. That terrible night has

stamped its impress upon all her after life.

 

Slowly and wearily her mind goes over all that came after. The solemn

and stately funeral, the sad droning service, the bare bowed heads of

the mourners, and she herself in her widow’s weeds, white and

shuddering, but weeping not at all, her little azure-eyed golden-haired

boy by her side. He is dressed in black velvet, but not a shred of

crape, and people wonder a little at this strange neglect. His mother

would have it so—almost passionately she had torn off the band and

shoulder-knot of crape they had placed upon the baby viscount, and had

caught him to her breast, crying wildly:

 

“Oh, my Eric! my baby! my baby!”

 

They buried the dead lord of Dynely Abbey—laid him beneath the chancel

of Roxhaven Church, where scores of dead-and-gone Dynelys lay. There was

a tablet of wonderful beauty and cost erected above him, with a long

inscription, setting forth his virtues as a man, a magistrate, a

husband, a father. “And his works do follow him,” said the glowing

record. Was it in bitter satire they had added that, she wondered, or

was it ominously prophetic?

 

All was over, and then into Lady Dynely’s life came a weary gap—a

blank of months. Months when she sat alone in the grand, luxurious,

lonely rooms, white and still, never crying, never complaining, borne

down by the weight of some great and hidden trouble. Her health failed

under it. By spring she was the veriest shadow, and the family physician

shook his professional head, and ordered immediate change; Italy, the

south of France, a milder climate, cheerful society, change, etc., etc.

She refused at first peremptorily, then all in a moment changed her

mind, left little Eric in charge of his governess and the housekeeper,

and started upon her travels. Not to Italy or France, though; but, to

the intense disgust of her maid, to Ireland. Ireland, of all places in

the world, and to the wildest of all wild Ireland—Galway.

 

She had some object in view—Hortense, the maid, could see that; some

object that lent a glow to her pallid cheeks, a light to her dim eyes,

an energy to her listless movements, that marvellously astonished that

handmaiden. In the claddagh on the Galway coast her Irish journey came

to an end.

 

She left her maid behind her the day of her arrival in the town, and

went on alone to this wild village of Galway fishermen. She made her way

to the cabin of one Mickey Gannon, and came among them, in their squalor

and their poverty, almost as a visitant from another world. Her apology

for entering came to hand readily enough.

 

“It had begun to rain”—her seal jacket was drenched; “might she seek

shelter here for a few minutes, until the storm abated? She was a

tourist exploring the west.” That was her faltered excuse.

 

They gave her the best seat and the cordial welcome for which the Irish

heart is famous, and which bursts out even in their national motto,

Cead mille failthe. They gave her the place by the fire, and drew back

in respectful silence to gaze at the pale, fair English lady.

 

There seemed to be a dozen children, more or less, swarming about the

cabin. With keen anxiety in her eyes, Lady Dynely looked from face to

face, and finally her gaze lighted and lingered on one. It was a little

lad of seven, rather more of a tatterdemalion, if possible, than even

the rest, with a shaggy crop of red, unkempt hair, and two big blue

eyes, round with wonder as midnight moons.

 

“Are all these children yours?” she asked the matron of the house; but

that lady shook her head; she could not speak a word of the Sassanach

tongue.

 

“But, sure Biddy can spake the English illegant,” suggested the father

of the family; and Biddy was summoned—a strapping lass with rose-red

cheeks, gray eyes, jet-black hair, and a musical brogue—a very siren of

western Ireland. Biddy came, made a bashful courtesy to the quality, and

stood waiting to be questioned. My lady repeated her query.

 

“Are all these your brothers and sisters, my good girl?” with a smile;

“so many of them there are.”

 

“All but one, yer ladyship—the red-headed gossoon beyant in the corner.

He’s me sisther’s chile,”