Run to Earth by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (top books to read .TXT) 📕

Madame Durski!" cried Reginald, with a sneer; "this is a wonderful change."

"You thought, perhaps, there were no limits to a woman's folly," said Paulina; "but you see you were wrong. There is an end even to that. And now, Sir Reginald Eversleigh, I will wish you good evening, and farewell."

"Is this a farce, Paulina?" asked the baronet, in a voice that was almost stifled by rage.

"No, Sir Reginald, it is a stern reality," answered Madame Durski, laying her hand on the bell.

Her summons was speedily answered by Carlo Toas.

"Carlo, the door," she said, quietly.

The baronet gave her one look--a dark and threatening glance--and then left the room, followed by the Spaniard, who conducted him to his cab with every token of grave respect.

"Curse her!" muttered Sir Reginald, between his set teeth, as he drove away from Hilton House. "It must be Douglas Dale who has given her the power to insult me thus, and he shall pay for her insolence. But why did Victor bring those two together? An alliance between them can only result in mischief to me. I must and will fathom his motive for conduct that seems so incomprehensible."

* * * * *


Sir Reginald and his fatal ally, Carrington, met on the following day, and the former angrily related the scene which had been enacted at Hilton House.

"Your influence has been at work there," he exclaimed. "You have brought about an alliance between this woman and Douglas Dale."

"I have," answered Victor, coolly. "Mr. Dale has offered her his hand and fortune, as well as his heart, and has been accepted."

"You are going to play me false, Victor Carrington!"

"Indeed!"

"Yes, or else why take such pains to bring about this marriage?"

"You are a fool, Reginald Eversleigh, and an obstinate fool, or you would not harp upon this subject after what I have said. I have told you that the marriage which you fear will never take place."

"How will you prevent it?"

"As easily as I could bring it about, did I choose to do so. Pshaw! my dear boy, the simple, honest people in this world are so many puppets, and it needs but the master-mind to pull the strings."

"If this marriage is not intended to take place, why have you brought about an engagement between Paulina and Douglas?" asked the baronet, in nowise convinced by what his ally had said. "I have my reasons, and good ones, though you are too dull of brain to perceive them," replied Victor, impatiently. "You and your cousin, Douglas Dale, have been fast friends, have you not?"

"We have."

"Listen to me, then. If he were to die without direct heirs you are the only person who would profit by his death; and if he, a young; man, powerful of frame, in robust health, no likely subject for disease, were to die, leaving you owner of ten thousand a year, and were to die while in the habit of holding daily intercourse with you, known to be your friend and companion, is it not just possible that malevolent and suspicious people might drop strange hints as to the cause of his death? They might harp upon your motives for wishing him out of the way. They might dwell upon the fact that you were so much together, and that you had such opportunities--mark me, Reginald, _opportunities_-- for tampering with the one solitary life which stood between you and fortune. They might say all this, might they not?"

"Yes," replied Reginald, in his gloomiest tone, "they might."

"Very well, then, if you take my advice, you will cut your cousin's acquaintance from this time. You will take care to let your friends of the clubs know that he has supplanted you in the affections of the woman you loved, and that you and he are no longer on speaking terms. You will cut him publicly at one of your clubs; so that the fact of the coldness between you may become sufficiently notorious. And when you have done this, you will start for the Continent."

"Go abroad? But why?"

"That is my secret. Remember, you have promised to obey me blindly," answered Victor. "You will go abroad; you will let the world know that you and Douglas Dale are divided by the width of the Channel; you will leave him free to devote himself to the woman he has chosen for his wife; and if, while engaged to her, an untimely fate should overtake this young man--if he, like his elder brother, should be removed from your pathway, the most malicious scandal-monger that ever lived could scarcely say that you had any hand in his fate."

"I understand," murmured Reginald, in a low voice; "I understand."

He said no more. He had grown white to the very lips; and those pale lips were dry and feverish. But the conversation changed abruptly, and Douglas Dale's name was not again mentioned.

In the meantime, the betrothed lovers had been very happy and this interview, which she had always dreaded but felt she could not avoid, having passed over, Paulina was more at liberty to realize her changed position, and dwell on her future prospects. She was really happy, but in her happiness there was some touch of fever, something too much of nervous excitement. It was not the calm happiness which makes the crowning joy of an untroubled life. A long career of artificial excitement, of alternate fears and hopes, the mad delight and madder despair which makes the gambler's fever, had unfitted Paulina for the quiet peace of a spirit at rest. She yearned for rest, but the angel of rest had been scared away by the long nights of dissipation, and would not answer to her call.

Victor Carrington had fathomed the mystery of her feverish gaiety--her intervals of dull apathy that was almost despair. In the depth of her misery she had lulled herself to a false repose by the use of opium; and even now, when the old miseries were no more, she could not exist without the poisonous anodyne.

"Douglas Dale must be blinded by his infatuation, or he would have found out the state of the case by this time," Victor said to himself. "Circumstances could not be more favourable to my plans. A man who is blind and deaf, and utterly idiotic under the influence of an absurd infatuation, one woman whose brains are intoxicated by opium, and another who would sell her soul for money."

* * * * *


These incidents, which have occupied so much space in the telling, in reality did not fill up much time. Only a month had elapsed since Lionel Dale's death, when Reginald Eversleigh and Paulina had the interview described above. And now it seemed as though Fate itself were conspiring with the conspirators, for the watch kept upon them by Andrew Larkspur was perforce delayed, and Lady Eversleigh's designs of retributive punishment were suspended. A few days after the return of Mr. Larkspur to town, that gentleman was seized with serious illness, and for three weeks was unable to leave his bed. Mr. Andrew lay ill with acute bronchitis, in the lodging-house in Percy Street, and Mrs. Eden was compelled to wait his convalescence with what patience she might.

* * * * *


Sir Reginald Eversleigh and Douglas Dale met at the Phoenix Club soon after Reginald's interview with Madame Durski.

Douglas met his cousin with a quiet and courteous manner, in which there was no trace of unfriendly feeling: a manner that expressed so little of any feeling whatever as to be almost negative.

It was not so, however, with Sir Reginald. He remembered Victor Carrington's advice as to the wisdom of a palpable estrangement between himself and his cousin, and he took good care to act upon that counsel.

This course was, indeed, the only one that would have been at all agreeable to him.

He hated Douglas Dale with all the force of his evil nature, as the innocent instrument of Sir Oswald's retribution upon the destroyer of Mary Goodwin.

He envied the young man the advantages which his own bad conduct had forfeited; and he now had learned to hate him with redoubled intensity, as the man who had supplanted him in the affections of Paulina Durski.

The two men met in the smoking-room of the club at the most fashionable hour of the day.

Nothing could have been more conspicuous than the haughty insolence of the spendthrift baronet as he saluted his wealthy cousin.

"How is it I have not seen you at my chambers in the Temple, Eversleigh?" asked Douglas, in that calm tone of studied courtesy which expresses so little.

"Because I had no particular reason for calling on you; and because, if I had wished to see you, I should scarcely have expected to find you in your Temple chambers," answered Sir Reginald. "If report does not belie you, you spend the greater part of your existence at a certain villa at Fulham."

There was that in Sir Reginald Eversleigh's tone which attracted the attention of the men within hearing--almost all of whom were well acquainted with the careers of the two cousins, and many of whom knew them personally.

Though the club loungers were too well-bred to listen, it was nevertheless obvious that the attention of all had been more or less aroused by the baronet's tone and manner.

Douglas Dale answered, in accents as audible, and a tone as haughty as the accents and tone of his cousin.

"Report is not likely to belie me," he said, "since there is no mystery in my life to afford food for gossip. If by a certain villa at Fulham you mean Hilton House, you are not mistaken. I have the honour to be a frequent guest at that house."

"It is an honour which many of us have enjoyed," answered Reginald, with a sneer.

"An honour which I used to find deuced expensive, by Jove!" exclaimed Viscount Caversham, who was standing near Douglas Dale.

"That was at the time when Sir Reginald Eversleigh usurped the position of host in Madame Durski's house," replied Douglas. "You would find things much changed there now, Caversham, were the lady to favour you by an invitation. When Madame Durski first came to England she was so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of evil counsellors. She has learned since to know her friends from her enemies."

"She is a very charming woman," drawled the viscount, laughingly; "but if you want to keep a balance at your banker's, Dale, I should strongly advise you to refuse her hospitality."

"Madame Durski will shortly be my wife," replied Douglas, in a voice loud enough to be heard by the bystanders; "and the smallest word calculated to