CHAPTER XXVIII.
"I WOULD DO ANYTHING TO SAVE HIM."
Lady Eleanor reached Palace Gardens and went straight to her boudoir and flung herself on a couch.
To women of her class come very few such adventures as that which had happened to her this morning. From their cradles, through their girlhood, and indeed all through their lives, they are so hedged in and protected from the world outside the refined and exclusive circle in which they move, that there is little chance of their coming in contact with other than their own set.
She had seen Finetta on the stage of the Diadem, had heard of her, read of her, knew that Yorke Auchester's name was in some way connected with her, but she had never dreamed that a meeting with her would be even possible, much less probable.
And now she had not only met with her, but talked and listened to her.
The fact that she had done so filled her with shame and confusion. What would her friends and relatives think if they knew? What would Godolphin, the duke, say if he were told that she had not only engaged in conversation with this Finetta, but actually entered into a kind of compact and conspiracy with her.
But she soon dismissed this part of the case and allowed herself to think only of the information Finetta had given her.
Yorke going to be married!
She would almost as soon have heard that he was going to die. Indeed, death would not more completely remove him for her, would not set up a more surmountable barrier between them than a marriage. For if he were to die, she could still think and dream of him as hers; whereas, if he married, he would belong in this world and the next to another woman.
And such a woman! Finetta had spoken of this Leslie Lisle as if she were an uncultivated, half-educated country girl.
Lady Eleanor could imagine what she was like; some simpering, round-faced girl, just a step above a laborer's daughter. One of these girls who blushed with timidity and fright when they were spoken to, who spoke in a strong provincial dialect, who dressed like a dowdy and looked just respectable; something between a servant and a shop girl.
She was pretty, no doubt; but to think that Yorke, Yorke the fastidious, should be caught by a pretty face! Why, she, Lady Eleanor, was pretty! She looked at her pale, agitated face, and a kind of indignant rage consumed her for a moment. She was the acknowledged belle of many a ballroom. She might have been a professional beauty if she had cared to be one. She was accomplished, was in his own rank and class, a fitting mate – yes, she told herself with inward conviction, a fitting mate for him.
With her by his side, as his wife, he could have filled a conspicuous place in the world, their world, the upper ten thousand, the rulers and masters.
And he had passed her by and was going to marry a half-educated, uncivilized, uncultivated country girl, with pink cheeks and a simpering smile.
The thought drove her half mad. Finetta had said that she had tried to prevent it, and that it now rested with her, Lady Eleanor, to make an attempt.
Lady Eleanor shuddered and reddened with shame at the idea of being a conspirator with such a one as Finetta of the Diadem. And yet was not the object to be attained worthy of even such means?
She would not ask herself why Finetta desired to stop the marriage; she put that question away from her resolutely, and told herself that it was of Yorke and Yorke's welfare alone that she was thinking.
A servant came up to announce visitors, but Lady Eleanor answered through the locked door that she wasn't at home.
"I will only see Mr. Ralph Duncombe," she said, and she longed for his presence with a feverish impatience; though she had no fixed plan in her mind, nothing but a vague idea that Ralph Duncombe, the cute city man, might be able to help her.
About six o'clock the servant announced him, and she had him shown up to her boudoir. She had had time to collect herself and regain composure, to change her dress for a tea gown and do her hair; but her face was pale and still showed traces of the terrible agitation which she had suffered, and Ralph Duncombe as he took her hand looked at her inquiringly.
"I am afraid you have found the heat trying, Lady Eleanor. I hope you are well," he said, in his grave, sedate voice.
"Thank you, yes," she said; "I am well, quite well. But I am – what is the term you city men use when you want to say that you are worried? Pray sit down," and she pointed to a chair so placed that she could see his face while hers was against the light.
"We find 'worried' good enough for us, Lady Eleanor; but we are worried so often that we think little of it and take things very much as they come."
"Ah, then I envy you!" she said with a genuine sigh. "I am afraid you will think me very inconsiderate in sending for you, you who have so much to occupy your time and energies."
"I am always glad to be of some slight service to you," he said with grave courtesy, "and can always spare time to come to you when you send for me. Is anything the matter? Are you anxious about the Mining Company? You have no cause to be, for everything is going on remarkably well, and succeeding beyond my expectations. Some of the best men in the city have joined us, and, as I wrote to you, the shares already stand at a high premium. You have made a very large sum of money, Lady Eleanor, and are on the way to making a still larger."
"Money, money!" she exclaimed. "It is always money. You talk as if it were the one and only thing desirable and worth having! And, after all, what can it buy? Can it buy the one thing on which one's heart is set? Have you found it so all-powerful that you set such store by it?"
His face flushed and a singular look came into his eyes.
"I – I beg your pardon!" she said hurriedly and almost humbly. "I did not mean to be impertinent or obtrusive; but just now I am in trouble in which I think even the all-powerful money will be powerless."
"Tell me what it is," he said in a low voice, and rather absently, as if the hasty words she had just spoken were still haunting him. "That is, I suppose you sent to consult me about it?"
"Well – yes," said Lady Eleanor more calmly, but with her color coming and going. "I sent to you because you are the only friend I have whom I should care to consult about this – this trouble. Because I feel that you will understand, and, what is more important, not misunderstand me, or – or my motives."
"I will do my best to understand and sympathize, Lady Eleanor," he said, watching her, yet without seeming to do so.
"You remember," she said after a pause, during which she was seeking for some way of beginning the subject as if it were not of much importance after all. "You remember Yorke Auchester, Lord Yorke Auchester?"
He inclined his head, suppressing a look of surprise.
"Certainly," he said. "That is, I remember – I could not fail to do so – that I have purchased his debts, to a very large sum, on your behalf."
"Yes," she said nervously, "and I daresay – I know – that you have wondered why I have done so."
He kept silence, but raised his eyebrows slightly.
"Well," she went on, "it was to save him from trouble. He is a great friend of mine; his cousin, the duke, and I are great friends. But you know all this! And now I want to do something more for – for Lord Auchester."
He looked up. Her face was red one moment and pale the next, but she kept her eyes – the half-proud, half-appealing eyes – upon his.
"He is in great trouble and – and danger. A worse danger than a monetary one."
He smiled.
"Can there be worse?" he said with a city man's incredulity. "We live in a prosaic age, Lady Eleanor, from which we have dismissed the midnight assassin and all the other romantic perils which made life and history so interesting in the middle ages; and the only dangers we run now are from a railway or steamboat accident – ."
She tried to listen to him patiently.
"It is not that kind of danger I was thinking," she said. "Is it not possible for a man to – to ruin and wreck his life in – many ways, Mr. Duncombe?"
He looked at her still half smilingly.
"Oh, yes, a man may enlist as a common soldier, or forge a check, or marry his cook; but I do not imagine that there is any risk of Lord Auchester committing any of these – shall we say, follies?"
"Of all the things you have mentioned, it seems to me that the last is the worst," said Lady Eleanor bitterly.
"Yes?"
He raised his brows again.
"At any rate it is punished more severely than the others," she said.
"Yes," he assented thoughtfully. "But," and he smiled, "Lord Auchester does not contemplate marrying his cook, does he?"
"His cook? No; but he is in danger of marrying almost as far beneath him!" The retort flashed from her with hot hauteur. "Mr. Duncombe, when a man of Lord Auchester's station marries beneath him he is as utterly ruined, his life is as completely wrecked, as if he had committed forgery or enlisted as a common soldier."
He leaned back and listened with sedate politeness, wondering whither all this was leading, and what it was she would ask him to do.
"A man of Lord Auchester's rank has only one life – the social one. He has no business, no profession to fall back upon, to employ his thoughts, to engross and solace him. He must mix in the world to which he belongs, and he can only do so as an equal with his fellows. When he marries he is expected to take for a wife a lady of his own rank, or at any rate, a lady who is accepted as such in the circle to which he belongs. She must be one whom his friends can receive and visit, one of whom neither he nor they will be ashamed. His life may then continue in its old course; he will still have his friends and relatives round him, still have his place in the world, his niche, be it a high or a moderately high one, and all will be well with him."
She paused for breath, and put her hand to smooth back the delicate silken hair from her fair forehead.
"But if he should so far forget himself and all he owes to society as to marry beneath him – then, as I say he is utterly wrecked and undone. His friends will not receive his wife, or if they do it is with a coldness which she and he cannot fail to notice and resent. He sees them look pityingly, scornfully upon the woman he has made his wife, and he feels that he cannot take her amongst them. So he drifts from his own class, and either sinks into the one below it – where he is wretchedly miserable, or lives like a hermit. In the latter case he has plenty of time in which to get tired of his life and of the woman who has, in all innocence, severed him from all his old associates and, still in all innocence, has degraded him. The result, be it quick or slow in coming, is invariably the same. He is always thinking of the sacrifice he has made in marrying her, she is always conscious that he is so thinking, and sooner or later they grow to weary of and hate each other. She has ruined him, wrecked his life, and both know it! I am not speaking by theory; I have seen it, seen it in half a dozen cases, and I say that a man had better throw himself into the Thames than marry beneath him."
She dropped back in her low chair and put her hand to her head. She had talked swiftly, passionately, and her brow was burning.
Ralph Duncombe looked up.
"All you say is very true, no doubt, Lady Eleanor. And Lord Auchester – ."
"Is thinking of making such a match," she said in a low voice.
Ralph Duncombe looked at the carpet.
"It scarcely seems – pardon me – scarcely seems credible. I do not know Lord Auchester, but from what I have heard of him I should think he would be the last man to be blind to the consequences of contracting a marriage with a lady who was considered his inferior in the social scale."
"Ah, yes!" she said with a sigh. "So anyone who knew him would have said; but – but – in this matter even the wisest men are fools."
He smiled gravely.
"Yes, fools!" she said bitterly; "they are caught by a pretty face, a look in the eyes, a curve on the lip, a dimple in the cheek – ." She rose and took one or two paces, as if her impatience would not permit of her sitting still any longer. "At any rate, Lord Auchester has been so caught!" she wound up suddenly.
"And you wish – ?"
"Ah, I scarcely know," she answered, stretching out her hands. "He is doing this thing secretly. He is keeping it from his friends. From the duke, from – from me, from all of us."
"Then he is half ashamed of it?" he suggested.
"Perhaps so," she said. "Perhaps so. But if he has made up his mind to do it he will go through with it, in spite of all arguments and attempts to dissuade him. Yorke – " she used his Christian name unconsciously – "Yorke is one of the sweetest tempered men – you can lead him with a silken thread, until he has resolved to do anything; then – ." She had turned to him and looked at him beseechingly. "Can you help me, us; his friends, I mean, generally? He is so popular, so much liked. It would be a shame and a sin that such a one should be wrecked and ruined. In such a case a man should be saved in spite of himself. Can nothing be done? I sent for you, because you have always helped me, have always been so kind – ." She stopped and turned her head away.
Ralph Duncombe regarded her with grave surprise.
"I am very sorry," he said slowly, as a lawyer speaks to a client to whom he has been listening patiently. "But I do not see how you can act in the matter. You might try persuasion – ."
She shook her head.
"Ah, you do not know Lord Auchester!" she said.
"I scarcely see what else you can do. He's of age, and his own master, and the lady is of age, I presume. You could scarce bring any pressure upon her?"
Lady Eleanor shook her head scornfully.
"It is scarcely to be expected that she would be induced to release him. In these cases the woman is generally a low-bred schemer, or some simple girl who believes that she and the man she is ruining are in love. Oh, no; nothing can be done with her! Besides, I know – " she was going to say, "I know one who has tried and failed," but stopped suddenly.
"Well, then," said Ralph Duncombe, "I fear that I can suggest nothing. After all, if Lord Auchester is resolved upon committing social suicide – ."
"Oh, it is terrible, terrible!" she exclaimed in a low, agitated voice; "and I thought you would be able to help me."
"I am very sorry at being so useless," he put in.
"I thought that perhaps these bills you hold for me – that they would give you some power over him," and she colored and cast her eyes down.
He smiled.
"There is no longer arrest for debt, Lady Eleanor," he said. "They say there is no longer imprisonment, but that is not true. They imprison still, but they call it for contempt of court. Ah, it is a pity we are not living in the dark ages! We could have set an ambush for Lord Auchester, seized him bodily, and cast him into a dungeon below the moat until he had come to his senses; but there is an absurd prejudice against that kind of thing nowadays."
She drew a long breath, and, taking her silence as an acceptation of the fact that he could be of no use to her, he reached for his hat and prepared to go.
"I suppose it is the usual thing," he said sympathetically. "Some girl of the lower middle class has attracted him, and she and her parents have succeeded in obtaining a promise of marriage from him. It is not an uncommon case."
Lady Eleanor had sunk into the chair again, and answered languidly, for the excitement was beginning to tell upon her.
"I do not know the details of the affair. It is very probable. The girl's name is Lisle, Leslie Lisle – ."
"What!" The exclamation broke from him with the suddenness of a gunshot.
Lady Eleanor looked up, but he had turned and stood at a little distance with his back to the window; and, though pale as usual, his face was set and calm.
"I – beg your pardon, I did not quite catch the name," he said. He spoke very slowly, enunciating each word distinctly, as if he were uncertain of his voice. "I did not quite catch the name."
"Leslie Lisle," said Lady Eleanor. "He met her at a place called Portmaris. You may remember that I mentioned it to you when you were here some weeks ago."
"Yes – I – remember," he said, in just the same slow, mechanical voice. He put his hat down and sat with tightly set lips and eyes fixed on the carpet.
Lady Eleanor looked at his grave, set face, waiting.
"Have you thought of anything, any plan by which the marriage could be prevented?" she asked anxiously.
He was silent for a moment or two, then, without looking up, he said:
"And they are to be married secretly?"
"Yes," and her face flushed and paled.
"And at once?" he asked, and she thought his voice was strangely hoarse.
"At once, I – I am told."
"At once," he repeated, as if to himself. "Lady Eleanor, I see a carafe of water on that side table; will you allow me – ." He rose and crossed the room and drank nearly a glassful of water, while Lady Eleanor pressed him to allow her to ring for wine.
"No, no. Water, I prefer water. I am almost a teetotaler. Thanks, thanks," he waved his hand impatiently, almost imperiously. "And is that all you know? Do you know the place they are going to be married at?"
"No," she said. "Lord Auchester is in London," she added after a moment; "I saw him this morning."
He leant his head on his hand so that his face was almost completely concealed from her.
"In London. To be married at once," he repeated. He looked up. "I am thinking, Lady Eleanor – ."
"Oh, yes, yes," she breathed, leaning forward. "I know if you will only think you will find some way. It is a shame to bother and trouble you – ."
He smiled grimly.
"Don't mention it. Let me see." He put his hand to his forehead. "He is fearfully in debt. Some of those bills are long overdue. Do you think he means to leave the country?" He asked the question suddenly, with a flash.
"I – I don't know. He must, I should think."
"I see – I see," he said. "Say, don't be too hopeful, too sanguine. But – well, the law has long claws still, though we have pared them down pretty considerably. And in the city its claws are longer than elsewhere. That's an anomaly, but it's true. In a city court of law you can do strange things. For instance, if a man owes me money and I go and swear that I have reason to believe that he is intending to leave the country – to abscond, in short – the court has an almost forgotten power to stop that man. The machinery is antiquated and rusty, but – but it may be made to work." He rose. A strange light was burning in his eyes, a hectic flush on his pale and rather hollow cheeks. "Lady Eleanor – ."
"What is it?" she asked, almost frightened by the change in his manner, by the subdued eagerness and earnestness where a few minutes ago was only polite indifference.
"Lady Eleanor, if I consent to help you, I can do so on one condition."
"Yes! What is that?" she asked, trembling a little.
"That you follow my instructions to the letter. That you leave the whole matter to me, and offer no opposition to anything I may direct or do. I see – mark me! – I see a small chance, a slight hope of saving Lord Auchester from this," he smiled scornfully, "ruinous marriage. It is but slight, and to do anything with it I must have a free hand. Will you give it me?"
"I will," she said. "I would do anything – anything to save him."
"And so would I!" he muttered, but so low that she did not hear him.
CHAPTER XXIX.
THE NEW LODGER
Some blows which Fate deals us are so severe and crushing that, for a time, they deprive us of the power of feeling; and of such a nature was the bereavement which Leslie had suffered. She was simply crushed and powerless to feel or to act. Fortunately the landlady of the London lodging-house, and the young doctor, were kind-hearted persons, and they came to her aid.
Francis Lisle had quarreled with and separated himself from his people years ago, and Leslie scarcely knew his relations by name, but she found the addresses of one or two, and the doctor wrote to them.
It is a hard world. One can forgive one's relations many sins, but that of poverty is the unpardonable one; and those of her kin to whom the doctor wrote doubtless regarded this sudden death of Francis Lisle as an additional injury dealt to them by that eccentric and unfortunate man.
One brother wrote a letter to Leslie expressing the deepest sympathy, and regretting that a severe attack of the gout would prevent him attending the funeral, but desiring her to be sure and let him know if he could do anything for her. A cousin sent his secretary with a ten-pound note – if it should be needed; and another relative wrote to say how sorry he was, and that he should, of course, attend the funeral, and that he hoped and trusted "poor Francis" had left his daughter well provided for. He added, incidentally, that he himself had a large family, and had had a great deal of sickness that year; also that he would have been glad to have taken her into his house if it had not been so small and already overcrowded. The head of the family wrote her a short note from a German watering place, saying that he was in such a wretched state of health that he could not come to England, excepting at the risk of his life, and that it would probably not be long before he joined her father in the realms above.
"Ain't it dreadful, sir?" said the landlady to the doctor. "They don't seem to have a heart amongst 'em."
He shook his head. He had seen similar cases.
"I am afraid Miss Lisle is not very well off," he said. "If she had been an heiress her relatives would have flocked round her, overflowing with sympathy and offers of assistance. It is the way of the world, Mrs. Brown. I fear Miss Leslie will feel this neglect and cold-heartedness very keenly. We must do all we can for her."
"Yes, sir, that we will," said the woman, with moist eyes. "As to feeling it, I don't think dear Miss Lisle feels anything at present. I could scarcely rouse her to see about her mourning, and it makes one's heart ache to go into the room and see her sitting there in her plain, black dress – she would have it so simple and no crape, though I told her that crape was always worn for a father – sitting there and just looking before her as if she was too weak and overcome even to think. It's my opinion, sir, that she scarcely realizes what has happened to her yet. Since the day he died she hasn't shed a tear. And such a sweet young soul as she is, and so grateful for the littlest thing one does for her. But there, she was always the nicest young lady that I ever took in, always; and if her relations is too proud or too heartless to look after her, why she shan't want for a friend while Martha Brown has got a shilling."
The landlady's graphic description of Leslie's condition was a fairly truthful one. Day after day Leslie sat with her hands lying listlessly in the lap of her black dress, her eyes fixed on the trees in the square, her sorrow too great for thought.
If she had overheard the landlady and the doctor discussing her future she would have listened with perfect indifference. What did it matter what became of her, or whether she lived or went to join the poor, weak soul whom she had loved and cherished, and yet – ah, what bitterness was in the thought! – deceived! If she had not listened to Yorke's proposal, had not consented to his plan of bringing her to London, her father might be alive now! It was true that the doctor had assured her that the weakness of the heart which had been the immediate cause of death had been latent for some time, and that her father had been a doomed and sentenced man for years past, and that any shock would have been sufficient to cause his death; but even this assurance scarcely softened the poignancy of her remorse.
It was of her father and his loss that she thought entirely during the days immediately following her bereavement, and it might be almost said that she had forgotten Yorke and her great love for him. Almost, but not quite. It was lying in the centre of her heart, buried for a time under the load of her anguish and sorrow, but it needed only a sight of him, only the sound of his name, to arise, like a giant, and reassert all its old influence over her.
After a while she began to recover sufficiently to be able to think, to realize her position, and to look vaguely and indifferently towards the future.
The doctor, and the secretary of the great man, had gone into Francis Lisle's affairs, and discovered that a portion of his small income had died with him, and that what remained amounted to only a few pounds a year – not enough, by itself, to keep body and soul together. There was a little money in hand, but the largest part of that sum consisted of the fifty pounds paid by Mr. Temple for the picture he had bought; and Leslie, directly she was able to think, resolved that she would return the money, though it, and it alone, should stand between her and starvation.
There was something else also that she must return – the diamond pendant which Yorke had given her.
That, too, must go back. She could not summon up sufficient courage to take it from its hiding-place as yet; and, indeed, she did not know where to send it, unless she addressed it to the Dorchester Club, and it seemed to her that it would be wrong to send so valuable an article to a club; that she ought to send it to the duke's residence.
A woman of the world would have been aware that the address of so well-known a personage as the Duke of Rothbury could be found in a London directory; but Leslie was anything but a woman of the world, and felt helpless in her ignorance.
There was another article which lay in her box beside the diamond pendant; Ralph Duncombe's ring.
She remembered that, in a weary, listless way. He had said, when he placed it in her hand, that if ever she needed a friend, a helper, an avenger, she had but to send that ring to him and he would come to her side. But, though she were in the sorest strait in which a woman could be placed, she would not summon Ralph Duncombe to her aid; for to do so would be tantamount to engaging herself to him. The mere thought made her wince and shudder; it was an insult to the love that lay dormant in her bosom – her love for Yorke.
One day she got out her money, and spread it on the table and counted it. With the strictest economy it would not go very far, and it was all that stood between her and the grim wolf, destitution; for she felt that she would rather die than appeal for assistance to her father's relatives.
"In the struggle for life we forget our dead," says the philosopher; and the problem of what was to become of her gradually drew her away from the sad brooding over her bereavement.
What should she do? She could not dig, and to beg she was ashamed. The question haunted her day and night as she sat by the window or walked up and down the room, or lay awake at night, listening to the multitudinous London clocks striking the hours. One afternoon she summoned up strength enough to go out, and in her plain black clothes, with her veil closely drawn over her face, she walked through the squares into Oxford and Regent Streets. She felt weak and giddy at first, and soon tired. The vast thoroughfares, and their eager, busy crowds confused and bewildered her. It seemed to her as if every one was looking at her, as if every individual of the throng knew of her trouble, her double loss, and was pitying her; and she turned homewards, faint in body and spirit.
As she reached No. 23 she saw a cab standing at the door; the cabman was carrying a modest box into the house, and as she passed into the narrow hall a young lady, who was talking with the landlady, made room for her.
Leslie concluded that it was a new lodger, and went up to her own rooms to take up the perpetual problem. What should she do?
She recalled all the novels she had read in which the heroines had been left alone in the world, and sought some help from their experiences and course of action. But most, if not all, these heroines had been singularly gifted beings, who had at once stepped into fame and fortune as singers, actors, painters, or musicians; and she, Leslie, knew that she was not gifted in any of these directions.
"There is nothing I can do!" she told herself that night as she undressed herself wearily and hopelessly. "Nothing! I am a cumberer of the ground!"
She had tired herself by her walk, and slept the whole night, for the first time since her father's death; but she dreamed that she was married to Yorke, and that she was surrounded by a crowd – the crowd she had seen in Regent Street – and that they called her 'Your Grace' and 'Duchess.' And she woke to a sense of the reality with a heart that ached all the more bitterly for the pleasant dream.
Was it years ago, that drive to St. Martin's, when he had sat beside her and shown her how to hold the reins? Or did it never happen, and was it only a phantasy of her imagination?
So great a difference was there between then and now, so wide a gulf, that only the present seemed real, and the past a vision of a disordered mind! She unlocked the small box, and took out the diamond pendant and looked at it, and the scrap of paper with the precious words "From Yorke" written on it, until the tears blotted them from her sight; but they had recalled all the joy, the delight, the sacred ecstasy of the past all too distinctly.
It was true. She, Leslie Lisle, helpless, friendless, with only a few pounds between her and want, was the Leslie Lisle who had looked on that short sunlight of happiness.
She thought she would make another attempt to go out that morning, and after dressing slowly, and putting off the dreaded moment of leaving the house and facing the outside world, she went down the stairs. As she did so the door of one of the rooms on the floor below hers opened, and the girl she had seen in the hall yesterday came out.
She stepped back as she saw Leslie, and seemed about to beat a retreat back into her own room again, then hesitated, and made a slight bow.