A Mad Marriage by May Agnes Fleming (mini ebook reader .TXT) 📕

“Terry,” she says, “I have done my best for you, have I not? I have

tried—yes, Heaven knows I have—to make you happy! And you are happy,

are you not?”

Happy! he—Terry! A curiously sentimental question, surely, to ask this

big dragoon, with his hearty face and muscular six feet of manhood. It

strikes Terry in that light, and he laughs.

“Happy!” he repeats. “The happiest and luckiest fellow in England.

Haven’t a wish unsatisfied—give you my honor, wouldn’t change places

with a duke. Happy! by Jove, you know I should think so, with a

commission and five hundred a year, and the pot I made on Derby, and—er

your regard, you know, my lady. Because,” says honest Terry, turning

very red again and floundering after the fashion of his kind in the

quagmire of his feelings, “your regard is worth more to me than the

whole world beside. I ain’t the sort of a fellow to speak

out—er—um—what I feel, but by Jove! I do feel you know, and I’m

awfully grateful and all that sort of thing, you know. And,” says Terry,

with a great burst, “I’d lay down my life for you willingly any day!”

And then he pulls himself up, and shifts uneasily from one foot to the

other, and looks and feels thoroughly ashamed of himself for what he has

said.

“I know that, Terry,” her ladyship answers, more touched than she cares

to show. “I believe it, indeed. You are of the sort who will go to death

itself for their friends. The motto of our house suits you—‘_Loyal au

mort_.’ One day I may call upon that loyalty, not for myself but for

Eric. One day, Terry, I may remind you of your own words, and call upon

you to redeem them.”

“When that day comes, my lady,” he answers, quietly, “you will find me

ready.”

“Yes,” she went on, not heeding him, “one day I may call upon you to

make a sacrifice, a great sacrifice, for Eric and for me. One day I

shall tell you—” She paused abruptly, and looked at him, and clasped

her hands. “Oh, Terry! be a friend, a brother to my boy! He is not like

you—he is reckless, extravagant, easily led, self-willed, wild. He will

go wrong—I fear it—I fear it—and you must be his protector whenever

you can. Let nothing he ever does, nothing he ever says to you, tempt

you to anger against him—tempt you to desert him. Promise me that!”

He knelt down before her, and with the grace a Chevalier Bayard might

have envied, the grace that comes from a true heart, lifted her hand to

his lips.

“Nothing that Eric can ever do, can ever say, will tempt me to

anger—that I swear. For his sake, and for yours, I will do all man can

do. You have been the good angel of my life. I would be less than man

if I ever forgot your goodness.”

She drew her hands suddenly from his clasp, and bowed her face upon

them.

“The good angel of your life!” she repeated, brokenly. “Oh! you don’t

know—you don’t know!” Then as suddenly, she lifted her face, took

Terry’s between her two hands, and, for the first time in her life,

kissed him.

He bowed his head as to a benediction; and a compact was sealed that not

death itself could break.

*

With a start Lady Dynely awakes from her dream. The soft darkness of the

spring night has fallen over the great city; its million gaslights gleam

through the gray gloom; carriages are rolling up to the door, and Terry

Dennison goes down the passage outside, whistling an Irish jig. She

rises. As she does so, her eyes fall upon her son’s picture. The light

of a street lamp falls full upon it, and lights it up in its smiling

beauty.

“My darling!” she whispers, passionately, “my treasure! what will you

say to your mother on the day when you learn the truth? It is due to

you, and ah! dear Heaven! it is due to him. Poor Terry! poor, foolish,

generous Terry!—who holds me little lower than the angels—who loves me

as you, my heart’s dearest, never will—what will he think of me when he

learns the truth?”

CHAPTER III.

MADAME FELICIA.

Away beyond the stately and stuccoed palaces of Belgravia, beyond the

noise and bustle of the city, the fashion and gayety of the West End,

Mr. Locksley, the artist, stands watching the afternoon sun drop out of

sight beyond the green lanes, and quaint, pretty gardens of old

Brompton. His lodgings are here in a quiet, gray cottage, all overgrown

with sweetbrier, climbing roses, and honeysuckle. It is here he has

painted the picture that is to be his stepping-stone to fame and

fortune, “How the Night Fell.”

He stands leaning with folded arms upon the low wicket-gate, among the

lilac trees and rose-bushes in the old-fashioned, sweet-smelling,

neglected garden, smoking a little black meerschaum, his friend and

solace for the past sixteen years. Profound stillness reigns. In the

west the sunset sky is all rose and gold light; above him, pale

primrose, eastward, opal gray. A thrush sings, its sweet pathetic song

in an elm-tree near, and artist eye and ear and soul drink in all the

tender hush and loveliness of the May eventide—unconsciously, though,

for his thoughts are far afield.

Two years have passed since this man’s return to England from foreign

lands, and during these two years he has looked forward to one thing,

half in hope, half in dread, half in longing. That thing has come to

pass. It is yesterday’s rencounter with Lucia, Lady Dynely. She is of

his kin, and he has yearned to look once more upon a kindred face, to

hear once more a familiar voice—yearned yet dreaded it too; for

recognition is the one thing he most wishes to avoid. The past is dead

and buried, and he with it. The world that knew him once, knows him no

more. It is a past of shame and pain, of sorrow and disgrace. It is all

over and done with—buried in oblivion with the name he then bore. In

that world few things are remembered long; a nine days’ wonder; then the

waters close over the drowning wretch’s head, and all is at an end.

In the park, lying back listless and elegant in her silks and laces, he

has seen Lady Dynely often during the past season; face to face never

before. He stands thinking dreamily of yesterday’s meeting, as he leans

across the gate and smokes, and of his invitation of to-night.

“She did not know me,” he thinks; “and yet I could see it, something

familiar struck her, too. Sixteen years of exile—twelve of hard

campaigning in India and America—would change most men out of all

knowledge. They think me dead beside—so I have been told. Well, better

so; and yet, dead in life—it is not a pleasant thought.”

The blue, perfumy smoke curls up in the evening air; the thrush pipes

its pensive lay. He pauses in his train of thought to listen and watch,

with artist eye for coloring, the gorgeous masses of painted cloud in

the western sky.

“This Terry Dennison,” he muses again, “who can he be, and how came

Lucia to adopt him? It was not her way to take odd philanthropic whims.

A distant connection of the late viscount’s—humph! That is easily

enough believed, since he resembles sufficiently the late viscount, red

hair and all, to be his own son. His own son!” Mr. Locksley pauses

suddenly; “his own son! Well, why not?”

There is no answer to this. The serenade of the thrush grows fainter,

the rosy after-glow is fading out in pale blue gray, the moon shows its

crystal crescent over the elm-tree. His pipe goes out, and he puts it in

his pocket.

“France Forrester, too,” he says to himself; “the baby daughter of my

old Canadian friend, the general, grown to womanhood—Mrs. Caryll’s

adopted daughter and heiress, vice Gordon Caryll, cashiered. They will

marry her to Eric Dynely, I suppose, and unite Caryllynne and the Abbey.

A handsome girl and a spirited—too good, by all odds, for that

dandified young Apollo, as I saw him last at Naples. A girl with brains

in that handsome, uplifted head, and a will of her own, or that

square-cut mouth and resolute little chin belie her character. Still, I

suppose, a young fellow as faultlessly good-looking as Lord Eric needs

no additional virtues, and your women with brains are mostly the

greatest fools in matters matrimonial.”

With which cynical wind-up Mr. Locksley pulls out his watch and glances

at the hour. Eight. If he means to attend my lady’s “At Home” it is time

to get into regulation costume and start.

“I shall be an idiot for my pains,” he growls, “running the chance of

recognition, and only invited as the newest lion in the Bohemian

menagerie. And yet it is pleasant to look in Lucia’s familiar face once

more—to make one again in that half-forgotten world. Besides”—he adds

this rather irrelevantly as he starts up—“Miss Forrester interests me.

What a face that would be to paint!”

He turns to enter the house—then stops. A phaeton with two black,

fiery-eyed steeds, whirls up to where he stands, the reins are flung to

the groom, and a gentleman springs down, lifts his hat and accosts him.

“Mr. Locksley!”

He is a small, elderly, yellow man, shrivelled and foreign-looking, with

glittering, beady-black eyes. Beneath the light summer overcoat he wears

the artist catches sight of a foreign order on the breast. He speaks the

name, too, with a marked accent, as he stands, and bows and smiles.

“My name is Locksley,” the artist replies.

The small, yellow man hands him his card. “Prince C�sare Di Venturini,”

Mr. Locksley reads, and recognizes his interlocutor immediately. The

prince is perfectly familiar to him by sight, though for the moment he

had been unable to place him. He is a Neapolitan, the scion of an

impoverished princely house, and a political exile.

“At your excellency’s service,” Mr. Locksley says, looking up

inquiringly; “in what way can I have the pleasure of serving you?”

“That picture, ‘How the Night Fell,’ is yours, monsieur?”

Mr. Locksley bows.

“It is not sold?”

“It is not.”

“It is for sale?”

Mr. Locksley bows again.

“It is not yet disposed of. Good! Then, monsieur, a lady friend of mine

desires to do herself the pleasure of becoming its purchaser, and I am

commissioned as her agent to treat with the artist. Its price?”

Mr. Locksley names the price, and inquires, rather surprised at the

suddenness and rapidity of this business transaction, if the Prince Di

Venturini will not come in.

“No, no—it is but the matter of a moment—he will not detain Mr.

Locksley.” He produces a blank check and pen there and then, scrawls for

a second upon it, then with a low bow, a smile that shows a row of

glittering teeth, passes it across the little gate. The next instant he

has leaped lightly into the phaeton, and the fiery-eyed, coal-black

horses, that look as though they had but lately left the Plutonian

stables, dash away through the dewy darkness. Mr. Locksley stands with

his breath nearly taken from him by the bewildering swiftness of this

unexpected barter, and looks at the check in his hand. It is for the

amount named—the signature is his excellency’s own, but he had said the

picture was for a lady.