"Where am I taking you?" he repeated brightly, in answer to her inquiry, although to him it seemed as if a sudden darkness had chased all summer brilliance from the day. "Oh, to a favourite spot of mine--a bench overlooking the river under some tree--a hawthorn, I fancy! We can talk there without any fear of being overheard. My darling--are you quite well? Are you sure you are?"

As they left the open, and were under the trees--a belt of well-grown shrubbery divided the spreading lawns from the pleasance--he stopped, and placing his hands lightly on her shoulders, gazed with such honest worship into her eyes, that she flinched and glanced away. Her lips paled and trembled.

"May I kiss you, dearest?" he almost pathetically asked--his voice faltered. In return she flung herself into his arms, and lifted her lips to his. It was a great moment to him, that abandonment of pa.s.sion in his beloved--but even as their lips met, and he felt her heart beat against his own, a horrible sensation of despair mingled with the relief her spontaneous outburst had been to him.

She still clung to him after the embrace--her cheek against his shoulder--and he heard her groan.

"My love, this won't do!" he cheerily exclaimed. "You make me feel as if I had injured you somehow--that I must be a tyrant--a monster--if you repent of your bargain there is time yet, you know! Although I have the licence, and we could be married to-morrow if you chose, you can draw back. If you repent of your promise to marry me--I do not hold you to it! And remember, no one knows----"

She stirred--and rose. "No one knows?" she feverishly asked. "You managed it all--without--telling _anybody_?"

"Except the people I was obliged to tell to procure the special licence," he answered lightly, as he walked along at her side. "And they--well, one would as soon suspect one's lawyer, or doctor, or banker, of betraying one's confidence as the Doctor's Commons fellows!

It would be absurd."

The bench he remembered was there, under the hawthorn, which was still a ma.s.s of bloom. Below a stone bal.u.s.trade the river ran, wide, flowing, hastening seaward. They seated themselves. He took her hand, drew off her glove, and kissed the pink, soft palm of her delightful, delicately slender hand.

"How soft it is, dear little hand!" he said tenderly. "Do you know what the supposed experts say of a soft palm, or skin? That the possessor is morbidly sensitive and sympathetic! I have thought that of you, darling! I have wondered, sometimes, whether you are not indulging in melancholy retrospect--thoughts of your dead parents' troubles, or something! If so, nothing could be more foolish and useless! Can we recall the past? No! it is dead--there is nothing in this world so dead! Are we not taught that our great Creator Himself will not meddle with it? Darling, you make me cruelly anxious, and that is a fact, by your gloom! Do you think I do not know--feel--share your secret suffering? While I cannot guess what it is, I can hardly endure your evident unhappiness--I could bear it, if I only knew! Joan, Joan--I am almost your husband; as we are to be married so soon, you might confide in me! Child! My dearest--my almost wife--tell me! I can help you, I must be able to help you, and I will! Don't you, won't you, believe me?"

His words--his pa.s.sion--pattered harmlessly upon her preoccupied being.

She had an idea--by a subterfuge to place her awful position before him, and hear what he would say to it.

"Of course I believe you!" she dreamily said. "I know you would help me if you could! But how can you? It is a foolish and stupid, rather than a wrong, action of mine, in the past! You yourself say that G.o.d Himself does not meddle with the past! No! He does not! We have to suffer the consequences."

"But--one may deal with the consequences, darling," he tenderly said.

"Tell me--all--exactly as it is! Won't you? I knew there was something rankling in your mind. I can a.s.sure you we shall both be the happier for trusting each other. Come, out with it!"

"How can I put it to you without betraying--_her_?" she mournfully began, her strained eyes fixed on a beautiful clump of lilies, which seemed to mock her with their modest stateliness, their spotless purity--she, in her own idea, irrevocably defiled by her tie to Victor Mercier--her body smirched by his embrace, her poor cold lips fouled by his detested kiss. "It was--a dear, intimate friend, at school. I loved her so, that I believed in her feelings. I helped her in a secret love affair--with--a young man."

"Well, that was quite natural--there was no great harm in that, I am sure!" he exclaimed, heartily, beginning to be half ashamed of his secret doubts, and telling himself he ought to have remembered with what difficulty a girl brought up in a boarding-school learns life and its meaning, how a school-girl is handicapped when she starts real existence in the world.

"There was harm in it, although I did not think so at the time!" she went on, bitterly. "For she married him secretly--and no sooner had she done so, than he was taken up by the police for something or another--and ran away. She never heard anything of him until the other day, when he turned up. Oh, poor, unhappy girl! What is to be done for her? Cannot you understand that I, who helped to her undoing, am miserable?"

"My dearest child, we cannot go about the world bearing the consequences of other people's folly. It is not common sense, we have plenty of troubles of our own!" he said, almost chidingly. He felt just a little hurt that his love had not been strong enough to balance her vicarious suffering. The terrible truth that she was speaking of herself never once occurred to him. "Your friend married this man, not you! She must suffer for it. She had better make the best of her bad bargain--and really must not worry you! It is positively inhuman to do so!" He spoke with slight indignation. She shuddered.

"But surely--there must be some way to rid her of him?" she asked, striving with all her might to still her inward anguish, and speak collectedly.

"Oh yes, if she does not shrink from a public scandal," he said, somewhat dryly. "The young lady can apply for a divorce. How long since his desertion? Four years?" He shrugged his shoulders. "She had better employ detectives to find out his doings during those years. But she ought to consult lawyers!--What? She would not do that? Why not?"

"She will kill herself rather than do that--and her death will be on my--soul!" said Joan, solemnly. She looked her lover full in the face.

Why was it that at that moment in imagination he seemed to hear a bell tolling and to see a churchyard with a yawning grave--towards which a funeral procession was making its way? He gave a short laugh, which was more a sob. What a grip this girl had upon his emotions!

"What power you have over me, you girlie!" he said, chokingly. "You seemed to make me see all sorts of things ... Darling, if money is of any good to your friend--I should only feel too thankful to be of any help----What? It is of no use?"

"It is of no use!" cried she, in a helpless tone. "None! ... And you mean to tell me--that that few minutes in a registrar's office--can only be undone--publicly--in the divorce court?"

"There is only one other thing that can free her, my dear child--death!"

he said, seriously. "People seem to forget that when they rush into matrimony. But--my darling--" he looked anxiously into her half-averted face--"do you mean to say that this entanglement of your friend's is all you have on your mind--all? Joan"--he grasped her hands--"trust me--your husband--almost your husband--anything you may tell me--will be sacred!"

CHAPTER XII

Joan shuddered. To hear that fiat of her lover's--that only death or the divorce court could free a girl in her position from that slight yet deadly tie--and to hear it uttered with such seemingly heartless barbarity--was almost too ghastly to be borne.

She hardly understood his last impa.s.sioned appeal to her to confide in him--all--all that was troubling her. She stared miserably out upon the river. A steam launch went puffing up stream. Some one on deck was singing an apparently comic song to the strumming of a banjo; for shrill feminine laughter, mingled with ironic "bravos" was borne upon the breeze as the verse came to an end. Then the band engaged for the afternoon struck up a bright little march on the lawn the other side of the shrubbery. The mockery of the careless gaiety of ordinary life jarred her beyond endurance.

"Let us go away from here," she exclaimed, starting up, and glancing wildly at Vansittart.

His heart misgave him. This meant--he felt--that she was concealing something from him. Well! he must have patience, and bide his time.

"Presently," he said, in tender, but authoritative tones--and he drew her gently, but firmly, back on the seat by his side. "You must recover yourself first, darling--telling me of this wretched affair of your friend's has upset you! And really a girl who would be so reckless and foolish as to d.a.m.n her whole life in advance by linking it legally with that of the first adventurer who came across her, is hardly worth your sympathy, by the way! Come, cheer up, or people may, will think--well, they will make a shrewd guess that there is something going on between us, and you don't want that, do you?"

"Just now, I don't seem to care!" she replied--and her glance was one of slight defiance. "You are too hard upon my poor friend--she was a dupe rather than--what was it? 'reckless, foolish'!"

"I am afraid I must plead guilty to having scant sympathy with dupes,"

he said, somewhat slightingly. Her manner had hurt him unconscionably.

"I suppose that is why you fell in with my idea of making dupes of my aunt and uncle!" She gave a shrill laugh, so unlike her ordinary sweet, pleasant laugh--the laugh that had haunted him those lonely nights and days in strange foreign lands, when he had striven to forget her--that his temporary annoyance gave way to concern.

"That is hardly kind!" he exclaimed, reproachfully. "Remember, it was not I who wished for this extraordinary secrecy! However, let that pa.s.s.

One of the things I brought you here to tell you, dearest, is that I have hinted broadly to your uncle that I mean to make a dead set at you, and conquer all your various objections to marriage--and that I have his entire concurrence and sympathy! Is not that comforting?"

"It may be, to you," she said. "Honestly--dear"--she suddenly softened, and gave him a pathetic, beseeching glance--"I am good for nothing to-day--the past seems to have its clutch upon me, and I cannot feel with the present, or believe in a future! You must have patience with me----"

"You shall believe in a future, my angel!" he said emphatically--that look had swept away the cobwebs of doubt and vague suspicion, and he was once again the lover alone, as he drew her towards him and seemed to devour her with his eyes. "Listen, dearest--you have only to fix any day after a week is at an end, for our marriage, and the yacht will be ready. It is looking delightful--and I have already stocked it with a lot of things I think you will like. All I want now is one of your old frocks--to have some made by the pattern--and just one little shoe and glove"--he spoke hurriedly, somehow he shrank from such husband-like allusions as irreverent until she was actually and irrevocably Lady Vansittart--"may I, can I, have them, do you think? You see, I want you to be thoroughly, completely comfortable! And I do not mean the yacht to touch any port until we are absolutely compelled to--and then I shall choose some little station where one could not get ladies' dresses and things."

"How long shall we be able to wander without people knowing anything about us?" she asked eagerly. He was pleased--rea.s.sured--to see how the idea of a lengthy, secret honeymoon revivified her. She must love him!

How else should she wish to sail the oceans of the globe with him, alone, as her companion?

"Dearest, that will be for you to say," he fondly returned, gazing rapturously at the exquisite profile, waxen and delicate against the drooping black feathers of her picture hat. If only the lines under those beautiful eyes were less sharply defined, and the droop in those soft, sweet lips less ominous of secret sorrow!

But, as he himself termed it, at that juncture in their _tete-a-tete_ Joan seemed to "take a favourable turn." First, seemingly roused from her melancholy mood by talk of their approaching flight and consequent life on the high seas, she became steadily brighter as the afternoon progressed. Returning to the augmented crowd of Lady C----'s fashionable guests, they mingled with the rest, Lord Vansittart behaving with a decorous respect, and comporting himself admirably as a rejected suitor returned to the fray. Only when, by Sir Thomas' special invitation, he made one of the party on the coach, and throughout the home-going sat as close into Joan's pocket as he dared, did he permit himself to drop the carefully-a.s.sumed manner it had cost him such pains to maintain.

But, later, he was rewarded. After dining with Joan and a few guests of Sir Thomas', he spent a delightful half-hour with her on the balcony, among the flowers under the awning. No one could see them from below--opposite, the trees in the enclosure were dusky ma.s.ses in the starlight. The summer night seemed charged with love-murmurs--the glittering heavens to twinkle joyously of the great emotion which brought forth the Universe.

"Only a few days--and you will belong to me for ever!" he said, rapturously. Almost as alone in their sought-for seclusion as if they were already riding the waves of the southern seas in the ship that was to see their first matrimonial bliss, he held her in his arms, and tenderly, reverently--with almost the pa.s.sionate devotion of an anchorite kissing cherished relics--kissed her pale cheeks, her sweet mouth, her beautiful, thoughtful brows. "Darling--I will make you forget all your troubles--your self-reproach--everything that can possibly detract from your happiness! I promise you I will! Do, do say that you believe that I am capable of doing it!"

"If any one is, you are!" she murmured, clinging to him. "Somehow, to-night, I feel happier than usual--as if life had something in it, after all! And it is you who have made me cheer up--a few hours with you has given me a certain confidence--or rather, I should say, a hope--that perhaps the day may come when I shall be able to forget--everything--but my life with you!"

"G.o.d grant it!" he piously exclaimed; and for that night at least his prayer seemed answered--for after he and the other guests had departed, Joan retired to her room and seeking her couch, slept more tranquilly and dreamlessly than she had done since those evil days when Victor Mercier cajoled her into marrying him--and when almost on the morrow, she had learnt that her husband was an absconding criminal.

She awoke, too, with a new sense of safety--and of the very present refuge in her trouble--Vansittart.

"Even if he got to know--he would not turn against me, I am sure he would not!" she told herself, as she lay and thought of him, smiling.

For once she looked at peace and happy. "I feel it! How strange it would be if it turned out that he would have to fight my battles with uncle? But such things do happen--in real life as well as in fiction."

She lay and mused happily on the delightful subject--Vansittart, and the coming days when they would be all in all to each other--until Julie came with the hot water and the letters.