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

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There was a brief pause in the gay hum of conversation as they sat down.

Felicia’s cook was a chef of the first water—his works of art were

best appreciated by silence. For her wines—was not every famous cellar

in Paris laid under contribution?—nothing finer were to be met at the

table of imperial royalty itself. Presently, however, the first lull

passed, gay conversation, subdued laughter, witty sallies, brilliant

repartees flashed to and fro. Perhaps of all the clever company

assembled, the hostess herself was least clever. As a dancer she was not

to be surpassed—as a beauty she was without peer—as a brilliant, a

witty conversationalist, she was nowhere. She ate her delicate salmis,

drank her famous clarets and sparkling Sillery, laughed softly at the

gay sallies going on around her, and watched Lord Dynely, her

vis-�-vis, with a mocking smile in the languid depths of her topaz

eyes. He sat, like herself, almost entirely silent through all the

bright badinage going on around him, his brows bent moodily, drinking

much more than he ate—a sort of “marble guest” amid the lights, the

laughter, the feasting and the flowers.

 

Terry’s sudden coming had completely upset him. Something in Terry’s

eyes roused him angrily and aggressively. What business had the fellow

here? What business in Paris at all? Through the unholy glitter, his

wife’s face rose before him as he had left her hours ago, pale, patient,

pathetic. The tiny knot of roses she had given him gleamed still amid

the blackness of Felicia’s hair—Felicia, who, lying back, eating an

apricot, seemed wholly engrossed by her conversation with Dennison. The

broad band of gold and diamonds on her perfect arm blazed in the light.

Only yesterday he had given it to her, and now she had neither eyes nor

ears for anyone but this overgrown, malapropos dragoon.

 

“Mon ami,” Felicia said to him, with a malicious laugh, as they arose

to return to the drawing-room, “you remind one of the t�te de mort of

the Egyptians—wasn’t it the Egyptians who always had a death’s head at

their feasts as a sort of memento mori?—and the r�le of death’s-head

does not become blonde men. For a gentleman whose honeymoon has not well

ended, that face speaks but illy of post-nuptial joys.”

 

“Ah, let him alone, madame!” cried Cecil Rossart, a tall, pretty,

English singer, with a rippling laugh. “You know what the poet

says—what Byron says:

 

“‘For thinking of an absent wife

Will blanch a faithful cheek.’”

 

His lordship is thinking of the lecture her ladyship will read him when

he returns home.”

 

“If late hours involve curtain lectures,” cried Adele Desbarats,

shrilly, “then, ma foi! milor should be well used to them by this. To

my certain knowledge, he has not been home before three in the morning

for the last two weeks.”

 

“Let us hope my lady amuses herself well in his absence!” exclaimed

Miss Rossart, flinging herself into a Louis Quatorze fauteuil, and

rolling up a cigarette with white, slim fingers—“no difficult thing in

our beloved Paris.”

 

Eric glanced from one to the other at each ill-timed jest, his blue eyes

literally lurid with rage. Dennison’s face darkened, too, so suddenly

and ominously, that Felicia, not without tact, saw it, and changed the

subject at once.

 

“Sing for us, Adele,” she cried imperiously, lying luxuriously back in

her favorite dormeuse. “Mr. Dennison has not heard you yet. Have you

heard Mademoiselle Desbarats, mon ami?”

 

“I have not had that pleasure, madame.”

 

The vivacious little brunette went over at once to the open piano, and

began to sing. The others dispersed themselves to smoke and play

bezique. Madame’s rooms were Liberty Hall itself. Lord Dynely leaned

moodily across the piano, a deep, angry flush, partly of wine, partly of

jealousy, partly of rage at Dennison, partly of a vague, remorseful

anger at himself, filled him. For Terry, madame cleared away her billowy

tulle and laces, and made room for him beside her, with her own

enchanting smile.

 

Immediately above the piano—immediately opposite where they sat, a

picture hung, the broad yellow glare of light falling full upon it. It

was the picture that had created the furore last May in the Academy.

“How the Night Fell.”

 

“I have always had a fancy, madame,” Terry said, doubling his hand and

looking through it at the painting, “that the woman in that picture is

excessively like you. I never saw you with such an expression as that—I

trust I never may; still the likeness is there—and a very strong one

too. Do you not see it yourself?”

 

“Yes. I see it,” madame answered, with a slow, sleepy smile.

 

“It’s odd too, for Locksley—Caryll I mean—never saw you. I asked him

myself. He had a dislike to theatre-going it seemed, and never went near

the Bijou.”

 

The slow, sleepy smile deepened in madame’s black eyes, as they fixed

themselves dreamily on the picture.

 

“He never went to the Bijou—never saw me there? You are sure of that?”

 

“Quite sure. Told me so himself.”

 

“Ah! well, his dislike for theatres and actresses is natural enough, I

suppose, considering his past unlucky experience. Quite a romance that

story of his; is it not? Is she alive still?”

 

“No,” Terry answered gravely, “dead for many years. Killed in a railway

accident in Canada, ages ago.”

 

The sleepy smile has spread to madame’s lips. She flutters her fan of

pearl and marabout with slim jewelled fingers.

 

“Mr. Locksley—I mean Caryll—promised me a companion picture to this. I

suppose I may give up all hope of that now. I really should like to make

his acquaintance; I have a weakness for clever people—painters, poets,

authors—not being in the least clever myself, you understand. No, I

don’t want a compliment—there is no particular genius in being a good

dancer. For the rest,” with a faint laugh, “my face is my fortune. Where

is Gordon Caryll now?”

 

She speaks the name as though it were very familiar to her—with an

undertone—Terry hears but does not comprehend.

 

“In Rome, with his mother.”

 

“Does he ever come to Paris?”

 

“He is expected here almost immediately, I believe.”

 

“Ah!” she laughs. “Well, when he comes, Monsieur Dennison, fetch him

some night to see me. Will you?”

 

“If he will come. And when he hears you have wished it, I am quite sure

he will,” says Terry.

 

There is a pause. Madame’s eyes are fixed, as if fascinated, on the

picture beyond.

 

“I presume, after Mr. Caryll’s first unlucky matrimonial venture, he

will hardly thrust his head into the lion’s jaw again. I have heard a

rumor—but I can hardly credit it—that he is to be married again next

May.”

 

“It is quite true.”

 

“To a great heiress—to that extremely handsome Miss Forrester I saw so

often with you last season in the park?”

 

Terry bows. He does not relish France’s name on Madame Felicia’s lips.

 

“It is a love-match, I suppose?”

 

“A love-match, madame.”

 

She tears to pieces a rose she holds, watching the scented leaves as

they flutter and fall.

 

“But there is a great disparity of years. She nineteen, he almost forty.

I wonder”—she says this suddenly, flashing the light of the

yellow-black eyes electrically upon him—“if the first unlucky Mrs.

Caryll were not dead, only divorced—if Miss Forrester would still

marry him?”

 

“I am quite sure she would not,” Dennison responds; “but there is no use

speaking of that. The woman is dead—dead as Queen Anne—was killed in a

railway accident, as I say, and a very lucky thing too for all

concerned.”

 

There is a flash, swift and furious, from the black eyes, but Terry does

not see it. The ringed hands close over the pretty fan she holds with so

savage a clasp that the delicate sticks snap.

 

“See what I have done!” she laughs, holding it up; “and Lord Dynely was

good enough to give it to me only yesterday. Well—it has had its

day—he must be content.” She flings the broken toy ruthlessly away, and

looks up at her companion once more. “Does Miss Forrester accompany Mr.

Caryll to Paris in this expected visit?”

 

“They all come together—his mother, Lady Dynely (the dowager Lady

Dynely I mean), Miss Forrester and Mr. Caryll,” Terry answers, uneasily,

longing to change the subject but hardly knowing how.

 

She smiles a satisfied kind of smile and is silent. Her eyes rest on

Lord Dynely’s moody, sullen face, as he stands by the piano, heedless of

the song and the singer, and she laughs.

 

“Your coming seems to have had a depressing effect upon your kinsman. By

the bye, he is your kinsman, is he not? He was in the wildest of wild

high spirits before you entered. Is this romantic Mr. Caryll not a

relative also?”

 

“A second cousin. You do Gordon Caryll the honor of being interested in

him, madame,” Terry says brusquely.

 

Madame laughs again and shrugs her smooth shoulders.

 

“And you are sick of the subject! Yes, he interests me—one so seldom

meets a man with a story now-a-days—men who have ever, at any period of

their existence, done the ‘all for love, and the world-well-lost’

business. Shall we not call over poor Lord Dynely and comfort him a

little? He looks as though he needed it. Tr�s cher,” she looks towards

him and raises her voice, “we will make room for you here if you like to

come.”

 

“I shall make my adieux,” Lord Dynely answers shortly. “You are being so

well entertained, that it would be a thousand pities to interrupt. It is

one o’clock, and quite time to be going. Good-night.”

 

He turns abruptly away and leaves them. Again madame laughs, and shrugs

her graceful shoulders at this evidence of her power.

 

“What bears you Britons can be!” she says; “how sulkily jealous, and

how little pains you take to hide it. Why did not your Shakespeare make

Othello an Englishman? What, mon ami!—you going too?”

 

“For an uninvited guest have I not lingered sufficiently long?” Terry

answers carelessly, and then he hurriedly makes his farewells, and

follows Eric out.

 

He finds him still standing in the vestibule, and lighting a cigar. The

night has clouded over, a fine drizzling rain is beginning to fall, but

Eric evidently means to walk. The distance to the Hotel du Louvre is not

great.

 

“Our way lies together, old boy,” Terry says, linking his arm familiarly

through Eric’s, “so I cut it short and came away.”

 

“What an awful cut, for Felicia,” Eric retorts, with an angry sneer.

“Let me congratulate you, Terry, on your evident success; I never knew

before that you went in for that sort of thing.”

 

“If by going in for that sort of thing, you mean flirtation with

danseuses, I don’t go in for it,” is Terry’s reply. “If I did I should

certainly choose some one not quite old enough to be my mother.”

 

“What do you mean?” Dynely asks, savagely.

 

“I mean Felicia, of course—thirty-five if she’s a day. Oh, yes, she

is—I’ve heard all about her. She wears well, but she’s every hour of

it. And the most dangerous woman the sun shines on.”

 

“I wonder, then, you fling yourself into the jaws of the lioness,” Eric

retorts, with another bitter sneer. “You make a martyr of yourself with

the best grace possible—make love con amore as though you enjoyed it,

in fact.”

 

“I didn’t come to see Felicia,” Terry says, quietly. “I came to see

you.”

 

Eric’s eyes flash fire. He