Beyond The Rocks by Elinor Glyn (each kindness read aloud .TXT) 📖

her stolid face betrayed none of her emotion.

"Mother," said Hector, "I wish you would introduce me to Lady Ada Fitzgerald when you get the chance. I see her over there."

This was so obvious that Morella, who never saw between the lines, preened with pleasure. After all, he wished to spend Whitsuntide with her, and this anxiety to find Lady Bracondale had been all on that account. Lady Bracondale, who was acquainted with Miss Winmarleigh's plans, made the same interruption, and joy warmed her being.

She was only too pleased to do whatever he wished. And the affair was soon accomplished.

Hector made himself especially attractive, and Lady Ada Fitzgerald decided he was charming.

The way paved for possible contingencies, he escaped from this crowd of women, and once more began his search for Theodora. She would certainly return to Josiah some time. To go straight to him would be the best plan.

Josiah was standing absolutely alone by one of the windows in the ballroom, and looked pitiably uncomfortable and ill at ease in his knee-breeches and silk stockings.

He had experienced such pleasure when he had tried them on, and had enjoyed walking through the hall at Claridge's to his carriage, knowing the people there would be aware it meant he was going to meet the most august Royalty.

But now he felt uncomfortable, and kept standing first on one leg, then on the other. Theodora had not returned to him yet: the next dance had not begun.

This great world contained discomfort as well as pleasure, he decided.

Hector walked straight over to him and was excessively polite and agreeable, and Josiah's equanimity was somewhat restored.

What could have happened to Theodora? Where had that beast Wensleydown taken her? Not to supper—surely not to supper?—were Lord Bracondale's thoughts.

And then with the first notes of the next dance she reappeared. It seemed to him she was looking superbly lovely: a faint pink suffused her cheeks, and her eyes were shining with the excitement of the scene.

A mad rush of passion surged over Hector; his turn had come, he thought.

Lord Wensleydown seemed loath to release her, and showed signs of staying to talk awhile. So Hector interposed at once.

"May I not have this dance? I have been looking for you everywhere," he said.

Theodora told him she was tired, and she stood close to her husband; tired—and also she was quite sure Josiah would be bored left all alone, so she wished to stay with him.

But Mrs. Devlyn made a reappearance just then, and as they spoke they saw Josiah give her his arm and lead her away.

Thus Theodora was left standing alone with Lord Bracondale.

Fate seemed always to nullify her good intentions.

It was an exquisite waltz, and the music mounted to both their brains.

For one moment the room appeared to reel in front of her, and then she found herself whirling in his arms. Oh, what bliss it was, after this long week of separation! What folly and maddening bliss!

Her senses were tingling; her lithe, exquisite, willowy body thrilled and quivered in his embrace. And they both realized what a waltz could be, as a medium for joy.

"We will only have two turns until the crowd gets impossible again," he whispered, "and then I will take you to supper."

Lady Anningford had been rejoined by the Crow, and now stood watching them. She and her companion were silent for a moment, and then:

"By Jove!" Colonel Lowerby said. "She is certainly worth going to hell for, to look at even—and they don't appear as if they would take long on the road."

XX

"Oh, Crow, dear, what are we to do, then?" said Lady Anningford. "Surely, surely you don't anticipate any sudden catastrophe? In these days people never run away—"

"No," said the Crow. "They stay at home until the footman, or the man's last mistress, or the woman's dearest friend, send anonymous letters to the husband."

"But—"

"Well, I tell you, Queen Anne, to me this appears serious. I know Hector pretty well, and I have never seen him as far gone as this before. The woman—she is a mere child—looks as unsophisticated as a baby, and probably is. She won't have the least idea of managing the affair. She will tumble headlong into it."

"Well, what is to be done, then?" exclaimed Anne, piteously.

"You had better talk to him quietly. He is very fond of you. Though nothing, I am afraid, will be of the least use," said the Crow.

"But if she is going into the country they won't meet," reasoned Anne. "You saw the dreadful-looking husband just now. Will he be the colonial who will object, do you think, or the English snob who won't?"

But the Crow refused to give any more opinions except in general.

It all came, he said, from the ridiculous marriage laws in this over-civilized country. Why should not people eminently suited to each other be allowed to be happy?

"It is too bad, Crow," said Anne. "You take it for granted that Hector has the most dishonorable intentions towards Mrs. Brown. He may worship her quite in the abstract."

"Fiddle-dee-dee, my child!" said Colonel Lowerby. "Look at him! You don't understand the fundamental principles of human nature if you say that. When a man is madly in love with a woman, nature says, 'This is your mate,' not a saint of alabaster on a church altar. There are numbers of animals about who find a 'mate' in every woman they come across. But Hector is not that sort. Look at his face—look at him now they are passing us, and tell me if you see any abstract about it?"

Anne was forced to admit she did not; and it was with intense uneasiness she saw her brother and his partner stop, and disappear through one of the doors towards the supper-room.

When her mother perceived the situation—or Morella—disagreeable moments would begin at once for everybody!

Meanwhile, the culprits were extremely happy.

With the finest and noblest intention in the world, Theodora was too young, and too healthy, not to have become exhilarated with the dance and the scene. Something whispered, Why should she not enjoy herself to-night? What harm could there be in dancing? Every one danced—and Josiah, himself, had left her alone.

Hector had not said a word that she must rebuke him for; they had just waltzed and thrilled, and been—happy!

And now she was going to eat some supper with him, and forget there were any to-morrows.

They found a secluded corner, and spent half an hour in perfect peace. Hector was an artist in pleasing women—and to-night, though he never once transgressed in words, she could feel through it all that he loved her—loved her madly. His voice was so tender and deep, and his thought for her slightest wish and comfort so evident; he was masterful, too, and settled what she was to do—where to sit, and now and then he made her look at him.

He was just so wildly happy he could not stop to count the cost; and while he worshipped her more deeply than when they had sat on the soft greensward at Versailles, even the whole sight of her pure soul now could not stop him—now he knew she loved him, and that there were possible others on the scene. She had trusted him—had appealed to his superior strength; he did not forget that fact quite—but here at a ball was not the place to analyze what it would mean. They were just two guests dancing and supping like the rest, and were supremely content.

He found out where she was going for Whitsuntide, but said nothing of his own intentions.

The blindness and madness of love was upon him and held him in complete bondage. The first shock, which her look of the wounded fawn had given him, was over. They had suffered, and made good resolutions, and parted, and now they had met again. And he could not, and would not, think where they might drift to.

To be near her, to look into her eyes, to be conscious of her personality was what he asked at the moment, what he must have. The rest of time was a blank, and meaningless. It is not every man who loves in this way—fortunately for the rest of the world! Many go through life with now and then a different woman merely as an episode, as far as anything but a physical emotion is concerned. Sport, or their own ambitions, fill up their real interests, and no woman could break their hearts.

But Hector was not of these. And this woman had it in her power to make his heaven or hell.

They had both passed through moments of exalted sentiment, even a little dramatic in their tragedy and renunciation, but circumstance is stronger always than any highly strung emotion of good or evil. At the end of their good-bye at Madrid their story should have closed, as the stories in books so often do, with the hero and heroine worked up to some wonderful pitch of self-sacrifice and drama. They so seldom tell of the flatness of the afterwards. The impossibility of retaining a balance on this high pinnacle of moral valor, where circumstance, which is a commonplace and often material thing, decrees that the lights shall not be turned out with the ring-down of the curtain.

Unless death finishes what is apparently the last act, there is always the to-morrow to be reckoned with—out of the story-book. So while exalted—he by his sudden worship of that pure sweetness of soul in Theodora which he had discovered, she by her innocence and desire to do right—they had been able to tune their minds to an idea of a tender good-bye, full of sentiment and vows of abstract devotion, and adherence to duty.

And if he had gone to the ends of the earth that night the exaltation, as a memory, might have continued, and time might have healed their hurts—time and the starvation of absence and separation. But fate had decreed they should meet again, and soon; and all the forces which precipitate matters should be employed for their undoing.

For all else in life Hector was no weakling. He had always been a strong man, physically and morally.

His views were the views of the world. It seemed no great sin to him to love another man's wife. All his friends did the same at one period or another.

It was only when Theodora had awakened him that he had begun even to think of controlling himself.

It was to please her, not because he was really convinced of the right and necessity of their course of action, that he had said good-bye and agreed to worship her in the abstract.

He had been highly moved and elevated by her that night in Paris. And when he wrote the letter his honest intention had been to follow its words.

He did not recognize the fact that without the zeal of blind faith as to the right, human nature must always yield to inclination.

So they sat there and ate their supper, and forgot to-morrow, and were radiantly happy.

As they had gone down the stairs Monica Ellerwood had joined Lady Bracondale in the gallery above.

"Oh! Look, Aunt Milly!" she had said. "Hector is with the American I told you about in Paris. Do you see, going down to supper. Oh, isn't she pretty! and what jewels—look!"

And Lady Bracondale had moved forward in a manner quite foreign to her usual dignity to catch sight of them.

"It is the same woman he talked to at the opera last night," she said. "She is not an American, but a Mrs. Brown, an Australian millionaire's wife, we were told. She is certainly pretty. Oh—eh—you said Hector was devoted to her in Paris?"

"Why, of course! You can ask Jack."

"I do not think we need worry, though, dear, because I am happy to say Hector shows great signs of wishing to be with Morella."

And with this pleasing thought she had turned the conversation.

"I think we