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

is too warm, she says; she will relieve Lady Dynely,

and play. Mr. Locksley makes his adieux speedily and departs.

 

“How have you come to pick up Locksley, France?” Eric asks, later on.

 

“Pick him up? I don’t quite understand. He painted the picture of the

year, sold it for a fabulous sum, was overflowing with orders, and, as a

special favor to Lady Dynely, consented to throw over everything else,

follow us down here and paint my portrait.”

 

She speaks with a certain air of constraint, which Lord Dynely does not

fail to notice.

 

“Ah, very kind of him, of course. Very fine fellow, Locksley, and very

clever artist, but a sort of reserve about him, a sort of mystery,

something on his mind and all that. One of the sort of men who have an

obnoxious wife hidden away in some quarter of the globe, like Warrington

and Rochester in the novels. I must see the portrait—is it a good one?”

 

“Very good, I believe—I have given but two or three sittings as yet.”

 

“How long has he been here?”

 

“A fortnight.”

 

A pause. He looks at her as he leans over the back of her chair. She is

slightly pale still, rather grave, but very handsome—very handsome.

She has improved, Eric thinks, complacently, and dark beauties are his

style, naturally. A very credible wife, he thinks; a fine, high-bred

face to see at one’s table; and if there be a trifle more brains than

one could wish, one can excuse that in a wife.

 

“I must get Locksley to make me a duplicate,” he says, bending over her,

and putting on his tender look. “France, you have not said you are glad

to see me yet.”

 

“Is it necessary to repeat that formula?” she answers, carelessly. “That

is taken for granted, is it not?”

 

“I was detained at Saint Jean,” he goes on. “I have been longing to see

you once more; how greatly, you can imagine.”

 

“Yes, I can imagine,” France answers, and suddenly all her reserve gives

way, and she looks up and laughs in his face. “I can imagine the burning

impetuosity, the fever of longing with which you rushed across the

Pyrenees, across France, and home. Eric, that sort of thing may do very

well in Spain, but don’t try it with me.”

 

“Merciless as ever. Your London season has agreed with you, France. I

never saw you look so well. And the fame of your conquests have reached

even the other side of the Pyrenees. How others slew their thousands and

Miss Forrester her tens of thousands. How men went down before her

dark-eyed glances like corn before the reaper.”

 

“My dear Eric,” Miss Forrester replies, politely shrugging with a yawn,

“don’t you find it fatiguing to talk so much? It was never a failing of

yours to make long speeches. But I suppose two years’ hard practice of

the language of compliments must tell.”

 

“Come out on the terrace,” is what he says, and in spite of her faint

resistance he leads her there. He is growing more and more charmed every

moment—not deeply in love, just �pris of this new and pretty face. He

is as much fascinated now as he was by madame last week, as he may be by

anyone else you please next, and thoroughly in earnest at the moment.

Why should he delay? Why not come to the point at once? Really, France

would do credit to any man in England.

 

The moonlight is flooding the terrace with glory, the trees are silver

in its light, the stone urns gleam like pearls, the flowers waft their

fragrance where they stand.

 

“Oh!” France sighs, “what a perfect night!”

 

“Yes,” Eric assents, looking up with his poetic blue eyes to the sky;

“very neat thing in the way of moonshine. And moonlight hours were made

for love and all that; the poet says so, doesn’t he, France?”

 

“The poet, which poet? Don’t be so vague, Lord Dynely.”

 

“Ah, France, you may laugh at me—”

 

“I am not laughing; I never felt less facetious in my life. My principal

feeling, at present, is that it is half-past eleven, that I am tired

after two hours’ croquet, and that I should—and will say good-night,

and go to bed.”

 

“Not just yet.” He takes her hand and holds it fast. “What a pretty hand

you have,” he says, tenderly; “a model for a sculptor. Will you let me

put an engagement ring among all those rubies and diamonds, France? I

wanted to once before—in Rome, you remember, and you wouldn’t allow

me.”

 

France laughs, and looks at him, and draws away her hand.

 

“There came a laddie here to woo,

And, dear, but he was jimp and gay;

He stole the lassie’s heart away,

And made it all his ain, Oh.”

 

“You certainly lose no time, Lord Dynely. Really the haste and ardor of

your love-making takes one’s breath away. I have more rings now than I

know what to do with—another would be the embarrassment of riches.

Eric, let us end this farce. You don’t care a straw for me. You don’t

want to marry me any more than I want to marry you. Why should we bore

each other with love-making that means nothing. It will disappoint two

good women a little—but that is inevitable. Go to your mother, like a

good boy, and tell her she must make up her mind to another

daughter-in-law.”

 

His eyes light—opposition always determines him for right or wrong.

 

“I will never tell her that. I love you, France—have loved you

always—you alone shall be my wife.”

 

“Eric, do you expect me to believe that?”

 

“I expect you to believe the truth. And if after all these years—after

what has passed between us, you mean to throw me over—”

 

“After what has passed between us!” she repeats, looking at him full, “I

don’t understand that, Eric. What has ever passed between us?”

 

“You know I have loved you—you did not quite cast me off—you know it

has always been an understood thing we were to marry.”

 

“And you mean to hold me to such a compact as that?”

 

“I mean I love you, and will be most miserable if you do not become my

wife.”

 

“Ungenerous,” she says, under her breath. “You will hold me to this

tacit understanding—to which I have never been a party, mind—whether I

will or no?”

 

He only repeats:

 

“I love you, France. I want you for my wife.”

 

She stands looking at the softly luminous night, at the dark trees and

white shadows, her face pale, her lips set, her eyes darkly troubled.

 

“It is unfair—it is ungenerous,” she cries out, presently, “to hold me

to a compact to which I have never consented. I will not do anything

dishonorable, but, Eric, it is most unkind. You do not love me—ah,

hush—if you protested forever I would not believe you. I know you, I

think, better than you know yourself. You mean it at this moment—next

week you may forget my very existence. I am not the sort of wife for

you—you want an adoring creature to sit at your feet and worship you as

a god. There!” she turns impatiently away; “let me alone. I can give you

no answer to-night. The dew is falling; let us go in. I hate to grieve

Mrs. Caryll, I hate to disappoint your mother—for your disappointment,

if any there be, I don’t care a whit.”

 

“France, you are heartless,” he says, angrily.

 

“No—I only speak the truth. Give me up. Let me go, Eric—it will be

better for us both.”

 

“I will never let you go,” he answers, sullenly. “If you throw me over,

well and good—I must submit—only it will not be like France Forrester

to play fast and loose with any man.”

 

Her eyes flash upon him in the moonlight their angry fire.

 

“You do well to say that,” she retorts. “You of all men! Give me a week;

I cannot answer to-night. If at the end of that time you are still of

the same mind, come to me for your answer.”

 

She passes him, returns to the drawing-room, and leaves him on the

terrace alone.

 

CHAPTER VII.

 

A WEEK’S REPRIEVE.

 

Miss Forrester goes to her room and sits at the window, after the

fashion of girls, and looks out. She had never taken this affair of the

proposed alliance seriously for a moment before. She had said, and with

truth, that she understood Eric better than he understood himself.

Somewhere in his wanderings he felt he would come upon some gypsy,

girlish face, that would captivate his susceptible, romantic heart—no,

not heart—_fancy_; and very probably there might be an impromptu

marriage, and an end of all worry for her. He was just the sort of man

to sneer at matrimony, because it was a cynical, worldly, correct sort

of thing to do, and rush headlong into it upon the slightest

provocation. To be “off with the old love and on with the new,” at a

moment’s notice, was my Lord Eric’s forte.

 

She had not disliked Eric, she had rather liked him, indeed—laughed at

his love-making, parodied his pretty speeches, mimicked his languid

drawl, and weary, used-up manner; treated him much as she treated Terry,

with a sort of fun-loving, elder-sister manner; only she had a real

respect for Dennison she never felt for Dynely.

 

“I never could marry such a man as you, Eric,” she was wont to say. “You

have a great deal fairer complexion than I have, and I don’t like dolly

men. You curl your hair; you wax that little callow mustache of yours;

you perfume yourself like a valet; you think more about your toilet and

spend longer over it than a young duchess; and you haven’t an ounce of

brains in you from top to toe. Now if I have a weakness, it is

this—that the man I marry shall be a manly man and a clever man. You,

my poor Eric, are neither, and never will be. And besides you’re too

good-looking.”

 

“First time a lady ever objected to that in the man who adored her,”

Eric drawled.

 

“You’re too good-looking,” Miss Forrester repeats with a regretful sigh;

“and over-much good looks are what no man can bear. You’re a coxcomb, my

precious boy, of the first water—a dandy par excellence. Why, you

know yourself,” cries France, indignantly, “your sobriquet at Eton was

‘Pretty Face?’”

 

“I know it—yes,” Eric answers, with an irrepressible smile.

 

“Then you see it’s quite impossible—utterly impossible and

preposterous, Eric,” Miss Forrester was wont to conclude; “so let us say

no more about it. I don’t object to your making love to me in a general

way—it’s your only earthly mission, poor fellow, and to veto that would

be cruel. But let it be general—let us have no more foolish talk of

present engagements and prospective weddings, and that nonsense. Because

you know it can never be.”

 

“Never, France—really?”

 

“Never, Eric—really; never, never, never. I wouldn’t marry you if you

were the last man on earth, and to refuse involved the awful doom of

old-maidenhood. I like you too well ever to love you. And I mean to love

the man I marry.”

 

“Really!” Eric repeats, lifting his eyebrows, and pulling the waxed ends

of the yellow mustache, intensely amused.

 

“Yes, Eric, with all my heart. Ah, you may smile in the superior

god-like wisdom of manhood, but I mean it. He is to be a king among

men—”

 

“Sans peur