 Chapter 25 and 26 of One Life, One Love by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. 25. Daisy's Diary in Joy. I am engaged to Gilbert Florestan. At last I understand what it is to be an engaged girl, and henceforward I shall be able to sympathize with every engaged girl in this world of whatever nation, of whatever color, whether she wears ostrich feathers and diamonds in her head at the Court of St. James, or dances in a feather-girl on some unknown islet of the South Seas, whether she spends her allowance on frocks or on beads. Yes, till I am ninety, till I am called in death, I shall be able to sympathize with every lover and every loved one upon earth. For now I know what love means. I know that it means everything. It means the color of the sky and the brightness of the sun. It means the perfume of flowers and the freshness of morning. It means the balmy noon tide. And it means the restful coolness of green-waving boughs. It means lamp-light at even tide in cozy gracious drawing-rooms. It means blind man's holiday beside the morning-room fire. It means all these. For all these have double beauty and charm and comfort and sweetness since Gilbert and I were engaged. What will Cyril think down at the bottom of this round globe when he hears that Gilbert and I are to be married on the first day of the new year? What can he think, except that I am the lightest and most trumpery young woman he ever had the misfortune to count among his acquaintance? Beatrice Reardon has been very nice to me. She says that I have nothing to be ashamed about in the transaction. It is customary. It is, one may say, a rule of the game. When people break off an engagement, even if they have been engaged for years and have doted on each other all the time, it is the duty of each to get engaged to somebody else without the slightest loss of time. They owe this to their own dignity. A girl who has the slightest self-respect will get engaged within a week after the parting, even if she has to marry a chimney sweep. Of course, said I. That is what Claire does in the Iron Master, and everyone knows what a perfect heroine she was. If you can just tolerate Mr. Florestan, you may consider yourself very lucky, said Beatrice. When I heard you were going to marry him, I made up my mind that he was absolutely loathsome to you. Did you? cried I. Curious, isn't it? I really can just submit to the idea of my future existence as his wife. I shall live next door to mother, and that will be some consolation. I meant to write everything in this diary. It was to be my novel, the romance of my life, with all its bright colors and all its dark shadows. It was to be a book to whose pages I could go back when I am middle-aged and when I am old, and live again all the happiest hours of my youth and awaken echoes of old voices and vivid smiles and every thought, feeling and fancy of the passing hour. The wheels of the chariot roll on so swiftly when one is happy. One should try at least to put a break upon memory, and for that there is only one way, pen and ink. Yes, I meant the story of my life to be complete, and yet I am going to leave one little blank. A little blank, did I say? A blank which represents the crisis of my existence, the turning point between dull patience and consummate bliss. I cannot write the mood and manner of my engagement that sudden passage from liberty to bondage when he took me in his arms in the arbor where we were once so miserable and called me wife. Wife. As if we were married already. Absurd no doubt to the indifferent reader, but the word thrilled my heart. I cannot write of his kisses or reckon them as if they were pounds, shelling and pants in the housekeeper's book. I cannot write all the sweet foolishness of his talk, the undeserved praises, the intoxicating flatteries which he protested were not flatteries. Of those ridiculous moments I can keep no record. Perhaps if I had been let in at the gate of paradise for half an hour I should not be able to describe the heavenly garden when I came out again. It is the same with that half hour in the arbor. He talked and I listened, and we were engaged. That is my only record. On the same evening, however, we had a very serious conversation on the terrace after dinner. Mother was in her favorite seat by the drawing-room window. Uncle Ambrose was pacing the room. We could see them both in the lamp-light as we walked slowly up and down. The evening was wonderfully warm and balmy for the end of September and the great full moon was rising behind Lamford Church Tower, this being the third moon we have worn out since we left London. We talked of the moon a little and he quoted Shelley, whom he knows as well as if he had completed one of Mrs. Cache's prizes, and then I ventured to ask him a question which had been burning my tongue ever since we were engaged just four hours and a half. It is wonderful what those four hours had done for me. I felt as much at ease with him as if we had been engaged for three weeks, and I began to understand the cool audacity of girls who send their fiancés on messages and make light of them in company, and the free and easy manners of the motherly girls who mend their sweetheart's gloves and scold them for spilling things on their waistcoats and put diacolon plaster on their wounds. Would you be very angry if I ask you a question? I asked. I should be angry if you wish to ask me anything and didn't, said he. Being your slave, what should I do? Please don't, I cried. Cyril quoted that sonnet once and I was quite rude to him about it. I shouldn't let you to quote anything secondhand. Yet it is a lovely sonnet, isn't it? I added apologetically for the line-sounded sweet from him. Cyril was not in touch with my ideas about Shakespeare. He laughed and answered with a most unnecessary kiss. You really wouldn't mind, I asked. From those lips all words are dear. Were you ever in love with anybody before you began to care for me? Ah, I thought that question would come. Shall I answer it jesuitically or honestly? Oh, honestly, please, be brutal to me rather than dishonest. Of course I am prepared for the worst. You must have adored ever so many girls before you happened to let your glances light upon insignificant me. Ever so many, that's a large order. Suppose I plead guilty to two. I wish I had never looked at a woman or at least never wasted a thought upon when till I saw you. I shouldn't if I had only known what was coming. Do you really think I am as nice as the other two? I asked, comforted by those sweet words. I think you are to them as a wild rose on a hedge in the dewy morning compared with a double dailier in the heat and dust and glare of a tent at a flower-show. You are as the freshness of the morning in the smelt of gas. The first could not help that, poor soul, for it was across the foot-lights my heart went out to her. Was she very pretty? I asked. She was very pretty. That was just fifteen years ago, Mark, you, when I was at Eaton. She is very pretty at this present hour. She will go on being very pretty, I hope, till the end of the century. She is a burlesque actress, and I saw her in the daintiest little village of stress you can conceive dancing as lightly as a real fairy and not a stage one. Yes, Daisy, he said gravely, I plead guilty to being overhead and ears in love with Miss Millicent Melville of the hilarity fifteen years ago for the whole space of the Christmas holidays. I was stone-broke for her sake and spent all my tips upon theatre tickets, hot-house flowers, and chocolate caramels. I delivered the flowers and the caramels to the surly stage-door keeper, who may have sold them to the minor members of the troupe for ought I know. I never got speech of my hurry, and I was heartbroken when I discovered, upon unimpeachable authority, that she had a husband and five children. How she did it, how she looked so lovely and self-like and childishly innocent, with an eating and drinking, smoking and swearing man and five brats to work for I have never been able to understand. Was she number one? I asked. Yes, she was number one. In that case I forgive you your first love, and now tell me about your second. That is a graver case, Daisy. I cannot make light of that infatuation. Cupid did not assail me with paper pellets that time. His arrows were barbed and the barbs were poisoned. I loved a woman who was unworthy of my love, Daisy. I passed through the scathing fire of a wasted passion. You loved her as well as you loved me, I asked, feeling just as if I had dropped from a paradise in yonder moon down to a heart cruel earth. All my gladness perished in one gasping sigh. I felt sure he had cared more for her than for me. I'm afraid I must plead guilty to having loved her very dearly while my love lasted, Daisy, but the cure was a clean cure. There was not so much as a scar left from the old wound by the time I met you in Paris, and from that hour I was yours and yours only. And if I had not broken with Cyril, what would you have done? Dragged on my roaming desilatory life and suffered the dull agony of an empty heart. Were you really unhappy in Scotland, in spite of grouse and salmon? In spite of as fine a stag as was ever stocked, which this hand threw the day before I casually heard that Arden had sailed in the big news steamer for Colombo. And would you not have found some new divinity before Christmas? It was delightful to have him there and to be able to cataclyse him, yet I could not help being savagely jealous of that unknown love the number two in his calendar. I could not but feel that it was nice of him to tell me the truth even at the risk of offending me for life. Tell me about that second flame of yours, I said agonized with curiosity. Was she very lovely? She was splendidly handsome, a woman whose diamonds seemed more brilliant than those of other women because they so harmonized with her bright beauty. I was among many worshippers, and I happened to be the most eligible of her adores from a matrimonial point of view, and so she was gracious to me, and so I was her slave. Did she guilt you? I asked, for there was a bitterness in his tone which assured me the dear creature had treated him abominably. I could have hugged her for it. Well it was hardly a case of jilting. If I were to write my story I should call the book Illusion and Disillusion. I was fortunate enough to find her out, before marriage instead of afterwards. My innocent little Daisy can hardly guess what a world of misery that discovery saved me. I don't want to guess, I said, but there is one thing I should like to know Gilbert. I blushed in the moonlight and trembled at my own audacity as I pronounced his Christian name. I had my arm through his and found myself giving his arm a gentle squeeze now and then just to make sure that he was real and that all the ecstasy of this hour was not a moonlit dream. Ask as many questions as you like, fair Fatima. There is no blue chamber in my memory of which you may not open the door. It does not pain you to speak of that wicked person. Not a whit. No more than it would pain me to talk of Cleopatra. But at the time of your disillusion did love die all at once or by inches? Love died in an hour, but there was something, the memory and aftertaste of passion which was plaguely long dying. Is it dead yet? I asked, frightened. Dead as a doornail, dead as Scrooge's partner old Marley, deader for no ghost of that vanished feeling will ever haunt me. I was heart whole the night I met you at the Grand Opera, and from that night I was your slave. Oh, that is nonsense, cried I. You could not have cared for me all at once, a common place English person like me. What was there in my poor face to catch your eye? Innocence, truth, candor. The virtues which make man's life happy and honorable. I saw poetic loveliness, and through that transparent beauty I saw the true and pure heart of girlhood, a heart of virgin gold, flawless, above price. Don't, don't. I cried standing on tiptoe to put my hand upon his lips. This last illusion is worse than the first and second. How can I ever live up to such an ideal as you have made out of me? Only love me, Daisy. There is no more to do. Oh, that comes too easy. I did that before I was asked. Mother's voice calling us from the open window put an end to our confidential talk, but my heart was quite at ease now that I knew the history of his earlier loves. If he had told me he had never been in love before he saw me, I should not have believed him, and I should have been tortured for all the years to come by inextinguishable distrust. All this happened nearly a month ago, though I couldn't bring myself to write about it before to-day, and perhaps I should not be writing now if Gilbert had not been obliged to go to London to see his solicitor, our first parting, leaving me to get through the day somehow without him. The grounds look so dreary, the shrubbery seems so empty. And oh, what ages to eight o'clock dinner when he will be back! 26. Daisy's Diary in Sorrow When I wrote the last line in this book I think I must have been the happiest girl in the world. There was hardly a cloud upon my sky. Yes, one cloud, the fact that the man whom I thought my friend and benefactor was out of health and unhappy. Yet in spite of that one cloud I was utterly happy, selfishly absorbed in my new happiness. Today I take up my pen in fear and trembling. A dark and terrible cloud has closed over my life. I thank God that cloud does not rest upon my lover's head. He stands out in the sunshine, and all my thoughts of him are full of thankfulness and delight, but I can no longer be the selfish, self-absorbed creature I was when I wrote those last foolish pages, giving myself up to this dumb confidante as I could do to no living being. I must think of others now. This dark discovery forces my thoughts into other grooves. I must remember that I am my mother's daughter as well as Gilbert's affianced wife. Oh, it is all so sad, so awful, such a cruel revelation, changing the whole color of life, stripping off the mask from a face that was once honored and beloved, opening a deep well of baseness and iniquity in the flowery garden world where I was so happy. To me it was a startling and sudden and blighting to come face to face with that great wickedness as it would have been to even Eden if the ground had opened at her feet and showed her a charnel-house there in that fair world where she had never heard of death. Sometimes for a few moments I doubt and I ask myself if I am not deluded, if that hideous suspicion which grew in an hour into absolute conviction might not after all be groundless, and then I go over the facts slowly, in cold blood, one by one, carefully putting them together again like the pieces in a puzzle, and there the awful fact appears an unmistakable certainty. Oh, Father, Father, how that trusting open nature that generous heart of yours was cheated! How coldly, deliberately and heartlessly your life was plotted away by the man who sat at your table and smiled beside your heart and was to you almost as a brother. It was your own familiar friend who planned your murder. I must go back to the moment when this hideous secret revealed itself. It was natural that as Gilbert's fiance I should tell him everything that had happened to me in all my life, and indeed I fear that I must have bored him sadly since we were engaged by prattling to him about every detail of my insignificant existence, my lessons, my boat, my play-fellows and friends. I don't believe I have spared him a single doll, certainly not a favorite doll, nor a single nursery anecdote, nor a single family joke. He has been told everything. Two days ago he came into the drawing-room just as it was growing dusk. He had been to London again, and we had had another parting, and I had felt very mopey all the afternoon, more especially as Mother had gone off on her weekly round to hear her weekly tale of woes and illnesses. I did not expect to see Gilbert until dinner time, and, oh, how my foolish heart thrilled with delight when I heard his step in the hall just after the clock struck five. It is not very often that I have the privilege of making tea for Gilbert, and on this occasion I am sorry to say I made it so strong that it was hardly drinkable. I saw he made a rye-face at every sip, though he declared it was quite the nicest tea he had ever tasted, and even chivalry did not enable him to empty his cup. Was it Metronich, or some other great diplomat who sipped a glass of castor oil with every sign of relish because his host had offered it to him as particularly fine toque, I asked him laughing at his self-sacrifice, and then I rang and ordered some chocolate alevanee which our butler makes to perfection. You poor victim of soft-heartedness, I said. Why didn't you tell me that the tea was horrid? I over-reached myself in mind ever to make it especially good so that you might have a high opinion of my domestic capabilities. I like strong tea, he answered, but certainly yours is a fortissimo. I fancy a good-sized pot of such stuff would serve to blow up the houses of Parliament. How gay we were as we sat and talked and laughed in the growing dusk with our feet on the marble curb crooning over the fire like John Anderson and his old wife. How proud I felt of my lover, and how blissful in the assurance that he was all my own, that I had left no corner of his heart unexplored, no secret hidden from my prying eyes. We sipped our chocolate, which was really delicious. What superior creature's servants are. If I had attempted to make that manier alevanee I have no doubt the result would have been, oh just, as dear Mr. Tool says in the upper crust. We sipped our chocolate and talked and talked not from grave to gay, but from gay to grave, and presently I told my dearest the single secret of my life, the one act of mine which I had hidden from the best of mothers. I told him how when I first went to London I was haunted by the ghastly vision of my father's murder and how a morbid longing to see the room where that dark deed was done took possession of my mind and would not be driven away. I told him how I crept out of the house in the summer twilight and described every step in that dismal pilgrimage till I came to Church Street on my way home. And then I told him of that intolerable Frenchman's insolence and of the good creature in the handsome to whom I should so like to leave a legacy when I am old enough to make a will if I only knew his honorable name. I know my enemy's name well enough, said I, for as the cab was driving off with me his friends called out to him, Hola du Verdié. Du Verdié, cried Gilbert starting as if he had been shot, great God in heaven, why that is the name of the man I believe to be your father's murderer. In the next instant he seemed to regret having spoken, but I would not let him take back his words. I made him tell me all he knew or thought or suspected about my father's cruel death, and stage by stage I got the whole story out of him. It was slow work, for he was sorely disinclined to tell me anything. Now that I know something I must know all, I said, when he refused to answer my questions, and so little by little I heard the whole story. My mother had asked him to help her in tracing out a girl whom my father admired and had half a mind to marry before he had ever seen mother's face. She appealed to Gilbert, counting on his knowledge of Parisian life and he had succeeded beyond his hopes up to a certain stage, but just as he had put his hand as it were upon the brother of this French woman whom he believed to be the so-called watchmaker in Denmark's street, the man left Paris, leaving no clue to his destination. I could do no more than leave the case in the hands of the Parisian police who have a strong motive for finding your father's murderer if he is above ground, said Gilbert. Of course my reasons for believing this to be the man are in a measure conjectural, but the circumstantial evidence is strong. The man who murdered your father was a man who knew the story of your father's youthful love affair and was able to use the French milliner's name as a decoy. It is known that Morel was in London with other communists at the time of the murder. It is known that he was heard of at Madrid soon after the murder and that he was then flush of money. For my own satisfaction I have convincing proof that this Divertier is the man Claude Morel, but it is not such proof as could be produced in a court of justice. The evidence that convinced me was the evidence of a woman's face. And then he told me how he had met Morel's sister and had taxed her with her identity with the girl whom my father once loved. Her emotion at the sound of my father's name was pitiable. Her agitation when he accused her brother of the murder was terrible. After that interview he had no doubt as to the guilt of the man now known as Lyon Divertier. The one missing link in the chain of evidence is the means by which the knowledge of your father's movements on that fatal day was transmitted to the murderer. He must have had an informant if not an accomplice, either in the immediate vicinity of this house or in the lawyer's office where the hour and the nature of his appointment may have been known to the clerks. A deadly chill crept through my veins as he said these words. I was glad of the growing darkness which hid my face from him. I was glad that I had deferred the lighting of the lamp so as to prolong our blind man's holiday. I sat silent, motionless, paralyzed by the horrible suspicion which filled my mind. Someone at Lamford must have given the information that enabled the murderer to plan his crime. Who could that someone be unless it were the familiar friend, the confidant of every enterprise and every idea of my mother and father? My mother has told me an answer to my questions that no servant in the house knew where my father was going or what he was going to do that day. The conversation at dinner on the previous evening had not touched on the business part of the transaction. My father had been full of the landscape gardener's plans and the talk had been wholly of the terraces and the arboretum of leveling and planting and laying on water for fountains and greenhouses. All that was known in the household on that evening or on the following morning was that my father was going to London and was to return before dinner. Yet someone had furnished such precise information that my father's murderer was able to meet him midway between the bank and the lawyer's office. Who was that accomplice, or worse than accomplice, of the murderer, since the idea of murder might never have entered Claude Morales' mind if someone, knowing my father's affairs, had not told him how large a sum of money might be gained by that crime? Who could that secret assassin, that worse than murderer, be but the man whose footsteps were now dogged by the shudder of blood? Who but that man whose face bore in every line the marks of an unextinguishable remorse, the man whom I had seen shrinking away with horror-stricken countenance from the room where my father used to sit and where his guilty conscience may have conjured up the shadow of the dead? His friend, his generous confiding friend. Oh, God, what a depth of iniquity! To have deliberately planned that cruel murder, to have plotted the crime which a vulgar assassin was to execute, to have waited and watched for the opportunity, perhaps to have tempted and persuaded the assassin against some remnant of better feeling, some instinctive shrinking from bloodshed, some scruple of conscience, and to have been with us day by day after that devilish act, our friend, our consolar, till at last trading on a woman's gratitude for fancied benefits, he put forward his claim to the wife of his victim and possessed himself of the object of his wicked love. Possessed himself. Yes, thank God, I know that my mother never loved him, that she gave her life up to him as if in payment of a debt, sacrificing herself to reward the fidelity of a lifelong friendship. God keep her from the horror of knowing what I know. My long silence made Gilbert uneasy about me and he was full of tender sympathy, thinking that our conversation about my father had renewed an old grief. Mother came in while he was consoling me and the lamps were brought and I had to put on a cheerful countenance somehow for her dear sake, and by and by I had to sit down to dinner with that Judas and still to play the hypocrite. I could hear the sound of my own voice as I talked and it had such a false tone that it jarred upon my ear. Oh, the horror of that hour in the drawing-room, when Mother asked me to play some of those quaint old variations she and I are so fond of, and when I sat before the piano and played like a machine while Ambrose Arden walked up and down with soft cat-like step, and now and again paused and stood behind me for a few minutes and once even laid his hand upon my shuddering shoulder. My whole being was one sense of horror and revulsion. I could scarcely breathe while he was so near me, yet I went on playing somehow always like a machine. Poor Mozart! You are not in your usual form tonight, Daisy, said Gilbert, who pretends to think a great deal of my playing. And then he came over to me and bent down to look into my eyes and talked to me ever so sweetly and his dear presence exercised the demon and that guilty wretch walked slowly away and went on with restless prowling to and fro, to and fro, like a spirit in hell, the hell of guilty memories and gnawing thoughts, the hell of the traitor and murderer, that hell within the soul of man which made Judas hurl back his fatal thirty pieces upon his tempters and rush out into the field and destroy himself. Where their warm dyeth not and their fire is not quenched. That is the hell which Ambrose Arden has made for himself. I went on playing while Gilbert went back to the other end of the room where he had been sitting with mother and challenged her to a game at chess. I was alone in the shadowy corner by the piano and as I played I watched that tall, slim figure with the bent shoulders moving slowly to and fro with a gliding motion. Since this awful truth has revealed itself I seem to see Ambrose Arden in a new light as if I had been blindfolded before and had made for myself an image of the man and colored it with my own colors. The face and figure I watched tonight are new and strange and the signs of a guilty conscience, the indications of a crafty and double nature seem to me now so strongly impressed upon every look and movement of the man that I tell myself I must have been blind all this time or I could not have missed this secret. It is there written upon his brow, the very brand that scared the forehead of the first murderer Cain. What a relief it was to be alone at last! Yes, even a relief to bid good night to Gilbert and mother and to lock the door of my own room and to sit by the fire face to face with the grim and hideous truth. I wanted to think out my horrible idea to arrange all the facts which seem to constitute such damning evidence against my stepfather to try if I could not acquit him or at any rate write, not proven against his crime. Alas, no. After long hours of thought, after a long winter night without one interval of blessed sleep, my reason still condemns him. In my mother's second husband, in the friend and teacher of all my early years, the man to whom I owed so much, in him whom last of all men I should have suspected I still see the murderer of my father. I recalled Duvalier's appearance in Grovener Square, his persistence in seeing my stepfather, his look of baffled fury as he left the house. I recalled his appearance in this place. Would any man without credentials of a guilty nature dare so to haunt a man in my stepfather's position? Yet this mere fact of the man's persecution would not influence me to believe in my stepfather's guilt. The evidence, that is to my mind conclusive, is the evidence of Cyril's appearance and Cyril's conduct upon the day when he played the listener to a conversation between his father and Duvalier. I saw those three figures in the lane, Ambrose Arden and Duvalier side by side, Duvalier talking angrily vehemently, though in a lowered voice, and that other figure following stealthily listening with bent brow and pallid face. Was it like my frank and manly Cyril to play the spy upon his father's movements to creep at his father's heels and listen to a confidential conversation? What could be more unlike his character as I have known it? Nothing but the most stringent circumstances would have forced him into such a contemptible position. And within two or three hours of that scene in the lane he came to me changed and aged as if by a mortal malady and told me that all was over between us. I remember almost every word of our conversation, his protest that the motive of his renunciation was one which I could never know, his resolution to go to the uttermost end of the earth to begin a new life to cut himself adrift from all old associations. And this determination, this abandonment of the whole scheme of his existence had been resolved upon since he left the rectory in high spirits the most lighthearted of men. What but some awful revelation could so quickly change the whole color of his life. This is the evidence that weighs most heavily with me and next to this is the evidence of my stepfather's decay, the gradual deepening of the gloom that has darkened over him in the midst of the happiest and fairest surroundings. No, I have no doubt now as to the brain which plotted the murder or the hand which sent the information to the murderer on the eve or on the morning of the fatal day. And my mother is this man's wife and must never know his guilt lest the horror of it should drive her mad. When I think of her abiding love for my father and think how she gave herself to this Judas not caring for him I am almost mad myself. Oh, what a cheat and trickster! What a prince of villains he has been to play so patient apart to sow the wicked seed at the first chance fate gave him and then to wait seven years for the harvest! Had he asked my mother to be his wife within a year or two of the murder her eyes might have been opened she might have suspected that he had some part in her husband's death. But after seven years of tranquil self-abnegating friendship after winding himself into our hearts by every artifice of an accomplished hypocrite it seemed almost a natural inevitable development that he should change from friend to lover and that his constancy in friendship should claim its reward. No, the dear mother must never know this hideous secret if any power of self-repression on my part can keep it from her. And so I have, day after day, to sit at table with a man who planned my father's death and I have to repress all signs of repulsion and to seem all that I once was to him at least in my mother's presence. Happily for me he spends the greater part of his existence in the solitude of the cottage over the way. Happily for all of us that existence is not likely to be a long one. Our Lamford doctor who went up to London with mother and her husband to assist at the visit to the physician told Gilbert in confidence that there is organic disease of the heart and that Ambrose Arden is not likely to live to old age. End of chapters 25 and 26. CHAPTERS 27 AND 28 OF ONE LIFE ONE LOVE BY MARIE ELIZABETH BRADEN. THIS LIBERVOLKS RECORDING IS IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. 27. THE AMIBLE MAGICIAN. Elderly men when they are in love are the weakest of mortals and weakness is prone to compromises. In his conduct towards his beautiful young wife Pedro Pérez showed all the weakness of an elderly lover. He halted between two opinions. He wanted to keep his treasure secluded from the world, secure from the pursuit of Parisian treasure seekers, and yet he wanted to flaunt his happiness before the eyes of those half dozen or so of competitors and rivals with whom he had ridden neck and neck in the Chasseau Mignon. The great race for wealth which is the favorite sport of this nineteenth century, whether the course over which it has run be the stock exchange or the gaming saloon, the silver mine or the manure heap. For Pedro Pérez the world meant one particular group of men at his club, one particular corner at his restaurant, and all his ideas of society were limited to that narrow circle of men who had begun life with a five franc piece and were ending it with four or five million sterling. To these few intimates Pérez had boasted of his wife's beauty and of the villa in which he had enshrined his idol as it were in a temple of silver and gold, and these on more than one occasion had expressed their desire to be admitted within the veil of the temple and to behold the goddess. Pérez coquetted with the situation. He declared that his young wife was up to retiring and modest the nature to endure the gaze of strangers. He compared her to the violets shrinking within the shelter of its leaves, but his friends were not to be put off so easily. Pérez never was a woman who did not like to be admired, said Joffreux, the famous contractor who, like Pérez, had made his fortune in Spanish America but in another line of business, and if your wife is a clever woman, she would like to make the acquaintance of the men of the world, like Josroth, Yonder, and myself. I have heard of your wife when she was only Mademoiselle Quijada living in retirement with her mother. A star-velling Pianoforte player who teaches my daughters was loud in his praises of the young lady. I can understand your not caring to introduce your friends to her while she was Mademoiselle Quijada when you might have run the risk of losing her, but now that she is your wife it is a miserly thing to keep your friends on the outside of your door, and I'll be bound the lady resents her seclusion. Pérez could not bring himself to deny the charge. He argued with himself that there could be no danger in allowing Dolores to receive old fogies like Joffre and Josroth, then whom Paris could hardly furnish to less attractive men. The former, oily of complexion and obese of figure with greasy iron-grey hair and a bottle nose. The latter, lean and lantern-jawed with foxy hair and beard and the features of a modern Shylock. The men who begin life with five francs and die worth five million sterling have very little leisure to sacrifice to the graces. Life with them means to eat and drink and calculate to invest and reinvest, to watch the money market with an unwavering vigilance and to concentrate all the forces of mind and body upon one great aim. No, there would be no risk in tantalizing these old comrades of the boss with a glimpse of his elegant domicile and his lovely and amiable wife, and in conceding thus much he would conciliate Dolores and her mother. He had refused to give a ball. He might compromise the matter by an occasional dinner party. A small snug dinner at which only wealth and mature years should be represented. I have not many friends, Dolores. He said to his wife that evening as she sat yawning on a low ottoman in front of the wood fire while he smoked as after dinner cigarette, but the few I have are devoted to me and they are dying to know you. I don't care about giving a dance as I told you the other day. I don't want to see my house turned out of windows to please a crowd of young fools whose only claim to notice is that they can imitate a teetotum, but I have no objection to giving a dinner now and then if you like. Dolores stifled a yawn before she answered. She had been looking at the burning logs in a waking dream, and this suggestion of a dinner party did not arouse any enthusiasm in her. The people you know are so dreadful, she said. You have pointed out men in the bois, your dearest friends whose appearance positively made me shudder, a long lantern-jawed man with red hair and a thread-bear overcoat, for instance. House Roth, murmured Perez recognizing the picture, a man only second in importance to the Rothschilds and the Mires, and a bloated creature with a complexion that suggests nothing but the refuse of the oil-mills. Jou-froid, and a little wise and rich with one shoulder higher than the other, and a long greasy hair of a greenish gray. Sturroski, said Perez, a pole by birth and the keenest financier in Paris. Do you know, Dolores, the amount of solid capital which these three men represent? I neither know nor care. All I hope is that they will never cross my threshold, unless indeed you allow me to get together so many artistic and agreeable people that I shall hardly be conscious of your interests. Where are you to get your agreeable people? asked Perez after a pause of discomputure, vexed that his compromise found so little favor with his idol. Oh, I will find them easily enough if you only give me leave to send out a few invitations. Dutuque knows lots of clever people, and he can send out my cards. Monsieur and Madame Perez invite Monsieur or Madame shows to spend the evening with them, with Monsieur Dutuque's compliments at the corner of the card. But have you ever met these people in Madame Dutuque's salon, a third floor in the Rue des Saint-Pères? inquired Perez incredulously. Certainly not. They would not go to a floor in the Rue des Saint-Pères. They would not go anywhere to be entertained with Dutuque's music and Madame Dutuque's weak tea. But they will come to my villa. They will come to the wife of Perez Perou. Voyons mon ami, let us make a compromise. Perez sighed. It was his own word. You shall invite those dreadful looking human ingots of yours to dinner, a dinner of all that is most precious in the way of gourmandese, and after dinner, I, Madame Perez, will be at home to all that is most distinguished in the art world, the painters and sculptors, the actors and actresses, the journalists. Who will write about your party in their accursed papers and who will ridicule your husband? Why should they ridicule you? Is it ridiculous to have married youth and good looks instead of age and ugliness? I can't understand, Pedro, why you are so ashamed of your wife. She lighted a cigarette for him as she talked, seeding herself caressingly upon the arm of his chair and transferring the cigarette delicately from her lips to his. She knew that he was yielding and that a caress and a few sweet words would clench the bargain. Ashamed of my wife? No, it is of the contrast between wife and husband, I am ashamed. It is that which the newspaper men will ridicule. They will be too wise to offend so powerful a man as Perez Peru. Ah, but they have lampooned me. They have seized every occasion to hold me up to ridicule. Simply because you live in your shell like a snail, you are of no use to the clever people of Paris. You fulfill none of the duties of a millionaire. You will be a few thousands richer when you die, but you will have offended everybody while you live. Give me carte blanche, Pedro, and you shall have all the comic journalists and caricatures at your feet. There shall be no dancing. There shall be no foolish young men, but I will give a party that will dazzle Paris. He did not yield without a struggle. He smoked a third and a fourth cigarette of his wife's lighting. Her gentleness, her graceful coquetry's made him forget every resolution he had ever made to live his own life and to keep the tinsel and folly of the pleasure-loving world outside his gate. He yielded after the fourth cigarette, as Ahasuerus might have yielded to Esther when Esther was still the latest novelty in the royal harem. Do what you like, Masherie. Invite whom you please. He murmured at last. The cards of invitation went out two days after that discussion. The list of names was written with the aid of the good Dutourc, whose professional career had brought him into communication with the art world of Paris, though it had not elevated him to intimacy with celebrities. Dolores trusted much to her own reputation as a beauty whose charms had been hidden from the outer world. The cards dispatched she went to the chief confectioners, electricians, florists and wine merchants of Paris. She called in upholsterers and tentmakers. She arranged for a series of three large marquees which were to cover the lawn behind her villa. The house in all its beauty and splendor was to be only a vestibule to these tented halls. The first marquee was to be decorated with palms and tropical plants and was to serve as a promenade pure and simple. Her drawing room was to be the entrance to this outer tent and here she was to receive her guests. The second marquee was to be decorated contrastably with tapestries and oriental brocades and here, there was to be a concert by some of the finest artists in Paris and in the world. The third and largest tent was the supper room, a supper served upon small round tables and which was to last from midnight till two o'clock. For this tent Dolores had imagined and the electricians had carried out the most distinguished feature of the entertainment. From the silken dome in the center of the immense circular marquee hung a monster egg shaped lamp, a lamp of opaline hue shedding the mildest milkiest moonlight radiance upon the supper tables and the supper eaters. This was the rock's egg and Dolores and her dressmaker had arranged a costume which without being absolutely a fancy dress should be so far oriental in character as to suggest the princess Badoul Badoul. It was very long since Madame Quixada's daughter had seemed so gay and girlish as in the fortnight during which the upholsters and electricians and tent makers were preparing for this eccentric entertainment. Her delight had something of childishness in it no doubt but that very childishness fascinated Pedro Perez and he soon found himself taking as keen an interest in the approaching entertainment as his young wife. She had kept her promise. There was to be no dancing and none of the gilded youth of Paris had been invited though Dutourc had been besieged by requests for invitations from even the highest quarters. It was to be a fate given to intellect and talent. Beautiful women had been invited but they were actresses celebrated for genius as well as beauty. The men belonged for the most part to the world of art and letters but from a list furnished by Perez the world of finance had also been bidden to the fate and the boss would be represented by its most powerful members. Madame Quixada had been allowed no active part in the preparation of her daughter's first party but she expressed herself gratified that the gloomy spell was about to be lifted from the house. Louise Mercè assisted in all the floral decorations for in the arrangement of flowers her taste was unerring but she told her cousin that she should not appear at the party. I should be like the skeleton at an Egyptian banquet she said when Dolora has pressed her to share in the amusement of the evening. It would make people melancholy to see so gloomy a figure. For old Louise, murmured Dolores moved to pity by the thought of this blighted life for which even pleasure had no charm, novelty, no fascination, your misfortunes must have been very terrible to deaden all your delight in life to make you so different from other women. My misfortunes were not of a common kind Dolores. If you knew all you would hardly wonder that I stand alone with the memory of my grief. But you have never trusted me with the secrets of your girlhood. You have never confided in me, said Dolores reproachfully. Though we are cousins I know no more about the cause of the illness that changed you than if we were strangers. There are some secrets that must be kept, secrets that involve the fate of other people. Well, I have never tormented you with questions. I am only sorry to see you unhappy. I am used to bearing my own burden, Dolores, and I am very glad to see you so much happier than you used to be. Oh, I have made up my mind to make the best of my life, if Pérez will only be reasonable and allow me my own way. I was simply breaking my heart in the rue Saint Guillaume for want of something to do and to think about. I used to read of balls and parties of all the grand entertainments of Paris and the gowns and the jewels while I was sitting solitary with my diamonds locked up in their cases. And then, as for the rest, with a sigh, there's no use in crying over the moon, is there, Louise? When one has not what one loves, one must love what one has. If you are thinking of Leon du Verdié, I can tell you that he is not worth one regret, said Louise earnestly. Try to forget that you ever saw his face. I have been trying ever since I married my good old Pérez. Yes, you are right, Louise. He is not worth one regretful thought. He never cared for me and I was a fool ever to care for him. He never cared for any living creature except himself, Dolores. His heart is harder than the nethermost millstone. 28. The Rock's Egg It was within an hour of the dinner party which was to proceed Madame Pérez's reception, and Dolores was sitting before her dressing table while the most fashionable hairdresser in Paris brushed and divided the long tresses of raven hair before building them up after the latest invention of his genius. Remember, Monsieur Gèque, my quaffur is to be oriental, all that there is of the most are oriental, said Dolores decisively. Monsieur Gèque shrugged his shoulders despondently. While his inventive and imitative powers had of late been concentrated upon the school of Pompadour and Dubarie, his delight had been to par le quaffur as high as art, horsehair, and hairpins could raise the human hair. If he had taken any step in another direction it would have been a retrograde step. He would have gone back to the Montespain and the Fontange period which was also an elevated school. But the oriental, the school of drooping tresses and long plates, the school which must need restricted operations to the hair that grew on the head of the subject and could borrow nothing from art. True, that in the subject now under his hands there was abundant material for artistic treatment, but the oriental style offered no scope for the caprices of genius. As madame made up her mind irrevocably, asked the hairdresser, Yes, yes, I tell you, my costume is oriental. I have only to submit. But I must warn madame that the eastern style, the style of Rebecca of York, is not that which will most set off madame's beauty. I detest Rebecca of York. Make me a quaffur à l'arroque salon, something light and gay. I don't want to look a tragedy queen. Has madame any diamond crescents among her jewels? As many as you like. Rosalie, bring me the case of crescents. The ladies-made brought a large purple velvet jewel case which she placed open on the marble dressing table. There were crescents of diamonds and rubies, diamonds and sapphires, diamonds and emeralds, diamonds pure and simple. Si elle, said the quaffur, I see my way to a startling success. He wove the soft black hair into three long plates and bound them round the small head in a triple coronet, and into this crown of plaited hair he stuck the jeweled crescents with an inimitable taste and a likeness until the dark hair served only as the background to a blaze of jewels. Yes, that will do, said Dolores, surveying herself in her hand glass. That will do very well for the princess Badroul Badour. I could have pleased myself better had madame given me greater liberty, said Monsieur Gèque, sighing as he folded his apron. You have pleased me and that is more to the point, replied Dolores with the air of a duchess, scarcely dating to acknowledge the hairdresser's departing salutation. Half an hour later her toilette was complete and she went down to the morning-room where she was to receive her husband's guests, the drawing-room being transformed for the evening reception. Her Badroul Badour gown was of the palest rose-brocade falling in long straight folds from the shoulders clasped across the bust with a splendid heart-shaped emerald and opening over a white satin petticoat embroidered with an artful and artistic admixture of Beatles' wings and emeralds. To the superficial observer that glittering green embroidery looked one mass of emeralds and seemed to represent wealth even greater than Pérez Peru could command. The millionaire gazed at his wife in a stupor of admiration. Dolores, why on earth have you put on all that splendor? He exclaimed, I have always understood that it is bad taste for a hostess to be finer than her guests. Nobody cares for good or bad taste under the Republic, answered Dolores. I want people to talk about my dress, and for that one must be splendid and original. My fate tonight is to be a scene out of the Arabian Nights. Do you think I look like the Princess Badroul Badour? You look very lovely," said Pérez, who had never heard of Aladin's wife. And you are proud of me and that is all I want," answered Dolores caressingly. Your human ingots can appear as soon as they please. Ah, here comes Mother. Madame Quijada had shown no aspiring after originality in her toilette, but she was richly dressed in black brocade and diamonds with a Spanish mantella of valuable old lace, a costume which became her severe style of countenance better than any more brilliant toilette would have done. She was looking ill, and that calm dignity which had distinguished her appearance in the seclusion of the Rue Saint Guillaume had given place to a nervous and sometimes restless manner which a medical man would at once have recognized as the manner of a sufferer from alcoholic poisoning in some form or other. I hope you are satisfied at last, Madame," said her son-in-law. All Paris is coming to see what a fool an old man can make of himself for the sake of a pretty woman. If the woman is only pretty enough, all Paris will go away convinced of your good sense, retorted Dolores gaily. Monsieur and Madame Geoffroy were announced in the next minute, and Dolores showed the most amiable emplacement receiving a tall, gaunt personage in sapphire velvet and rubies, who, twenty years earlier, had been the signature of a drinking cellar in the vicinity of the Boulevard Saint Michel, and who was now the discontented wife of one of the richest men in Paris. More guests arrived. Herr Hausroth and his daughters, young ladies who gave themselves tremendous heirs on the strength of their father's wealth, and who were rendered miserable by their father's shabby coats and by certain little miserly eccentricities of which he could not divest himself, although living in princely style and allowing his girls to get their gowns from the most expensive fesseur in Paris, which meant a corresponding expensiveness in all the minor details of their toilette, the great fesseur taking the word thorough for his motto and insisting upon his clients striving after ideal perfection in the art of dress. A badly cut corset, or a hair's breadth too much thickness in a petticoat, will spoil my finest conception, said the great fesseur. Two more financiers appeared, these without womankind, and in the little bustle and talk which followed upon their entrance, Madame Quirada drew her daughter aside. He is in Paris, she whispered. Not Leon, questioned Dolores nervously. Yes, Leon, I received a letter from him just now while I was dressing. I wish never to see him again. But he is coming to your party tonight. You must receive him civilly. He has no business to invite himself to my party, after leaving Paris without a word of adieu, and never writing to us in all these months. He is your cousin. He heard of your party from strangers, and it was scarcely strange he should invite himself. You must be civil to him, Dolores. You were only too fond of him once. You can at least afford to be polite and friendly to him tonight. I won't be uncivil, answered Dolores moodily, but I wish he were not coming. I don't want him to cross my threshold. Her face had clouded over. All the girlish gait he had gone from her manner as she took Monsieur Joffreau's arm and led the way into the dining room, where the arrangement of table, flowers, and lighting was exquisite. All her pleasure in the prospect of the evening's triumph was damped by the return of this man, whose coming had once been looked forward to with feverish impatience, whose absence had made the world seem a blank. She had had much time for quiet thoughts since her marriage with Pedro Perez, and her whole nature had changed for the better since her position had been legitimated, and she was able to look society straight in the face. Her heart was young enough and warm enough to be touched by an old man's affection, and now that she no longer considered herself a prisoner and a slave, she felt sincerely grateful to her millionaire husband. Disenchantment had slowly followed upon Leon's prolonged absence. She had begun to question the merits of the man she had admired and whose misfortunes had appealed to her pity. Little by little she began to see the charlatan where she had seen the genius, and the cold-hearted adventurer where she had imagined the careless happy-go-lucky student whose difficulties were a natural result of the artistic temperament. She had looked back on her intercourse with her cousin, looked back with unprejudiced eyes, and she had seen that his conduct had been mercenary from first to last, that he had taken every advantage of her regard for him and had given her not one token of affection in return. She had extorted money from her upon every possible pretence, and he had looked with a greedy eye upon her jewels and would gladly have appropriated them to his own use. She did not wish ever to see him again, and she dreaded any encounter between him and Pedro Perez. His presence at her reception tonight would be the snake among the flowers. As the evening went on, however, she tried to banish all thought about this unbidden guest. He would only be one among many, she told herself. She could dismiss him with a word. The dinner seemed a slow business to the women of the party, but the financiers enjoyed themselves and were unanimous in their approval of the menu. Geoffroy told his old friend Perez that he had the prettiest wife and the best cook in Paris. Hausroth was green with envy, and the daughter's Hausroth sniggered together at Madame Perez's Peru's Oriental costume, although their own famous faiseur had so cleverly planned the gown that it offered no marked eccentricity of character and might have been worn at a ball at the Yadizé. At ten o'clock Madame Perez was stationed in the drawing room at the entrance of the Marquis where the electric lamps were artfully dotted about amidst the tropical foliage. The light here and in the adjoining tent was subdued in tone so that when at the stroke of midnight the velvet curtains of the supper tent were drawn back, the rock's egg lamp might burst upon the spectators with overpowering brilliance. The rock's egg was the one feature of the party with which Dolores hoped to startle the spoiled children of Paris. The two tents for conversation and music felt quickly. Everybody had flocked eagerly to see the beautiful Madame Perez. A curious mingling of the grand monde and the demi-monde was to be noted among the guests, a new feature in the life of great cities and an evidence of the march of progress. Great ladies had begged for invitations which had been intended only for actresses and for the wives and daughters of artists with pen or pencil. Ducal coronettes were on some of the carriages which were waiting yonder in the wintry darkness of the wood. Ducs and duchesses had declared that they only wanted to look in at the millionaire's party, only to get a glimpse of the millionaire's wife. But finding the palm-shadowed tent a very agreeable lounge and that Far and Capul and Albany and Marie-Rose were among the singers, great ladies in their cavaliers lingered and began even to express a mild curiosity about supper, which someone had said was to be served punctually at midnight. Léon du Verdi approached his cousin immediately after she had exchanged courtesies with the ancient but beautiful Marquise Tellon Rouge and the lovely Comedienne Clara Beauville. He bore himself with his usual assured and supercilious air, but Dolore is noted that he looked pale and ill and he was thinner than when she saw him last. I congratulate you upon the success of your fate, he said, holding his cousin's hand with a lingering pressure. All the nobilities of Paris are pouring in at your door. I am glad I returned in the nick of time to assist at your triumph. Was it worth while to return at all after you had stayed away so long? asked Dolores, looking at him with a deliberate disdain, which had as chilling an effect as a cold douche after the hot room in a Turkish bath. My dear Dolores, matrimony seems to have made a remarkable change in your manner to your own kith and kin, he said smiling at her. I hope your head is not going to be turned by social success. No, my head will not be turned, but my eyes have been opened. You left Paris without a word to the people who cared for you. Can you wonder if they were enlightened by your conduct and left off caring for one who set so small a value upon the ties of kindred? I think I have learned to understand your character during your long absence and that I know you now almost as well as Louise knows you. His face darkened at the name and he looked round the room and beyond into the crowded tent as if he were searching out an enemy. I see, he said. Louise has been slandering me to you. I will not detain you from your guests, but later you must give me a few minutes quiet conversation. I have something important to say to you. It is a matter of life and death. I recognize the old prelude, said Dolores, question d'argent. Lyon du Verdi moved onward into the tent where people were promenading amidst a babble of talk and to the tent beyond where Capoulle was singing the Alleluia d'amour. Yes, the party was a success and walking about quietly among people who were for the most part strangers to him, Pedro Perez was gratified by overhearing enthusiastic praises of his wife's grace and beauty, her jewels, her costume, and the originality of her reception. True that he heard more than one modicism at his own expense and was reminded of a fact which he had never ignored, the fact that he was old and plain and insignificant and that his only value in the eyes of the Hooli in blush rose satin and many-colored gems must need lie in his millions. He heard and he did not despair. There was something, an undefinable change in Dolores, which told him she was not altogether ungrateful, and he thought that if he could pension off Madame Quixada and have his young wife all to himself, free from the mother's sinister influence, there would not be a happier husband in all Paris than he, Perez Peru. As for those airy shafts of ridicule which he had so dreaded in the past, he was resigned to endure them in the future so long as all went well in his domestic life. The concert closed with Ikhla in a new part song composed by Monsieur Dutouac, who had adroitly converted to his own use a certain almost forgotten march in an opera by Luli, a stirring melody which put the audience in good humor. And with the last chord, the velvet curtains which concealed the suppotent were drawn suddenly apart, and the rock's egg lamp bathed the scene in a soft yet dazzling light which set off the vivid coloring of fruit and flowers, silver gilt and Venetian glass, somo à la chambal, and oma en a speek on the fifty supper tables. There was a lively chorus of approval from the guests who had been wondering where the supper was to come from, and whether they were going to be put off with tea and coffee, ices and ice-drinks at the buffet in the dining room. The fifty tables were occupied as if by magic, and two hundred and odd tongues were chattering about the rock's egg. Quelle belle idée! Mais c'est une féerie! Il n'y a que l'argent pour faire des merveilles! C'est la baguette de la bourse! And so on, and so on, with illimitable variations upon the same theme. The supper tables were occupied till nearly two o'clock, and there was no failure in the supplies. At two, everybody had supped, and almost everybody had departed save a few nightbird journalists who still sat drinking and talking at a couple of tables. Among these was Léon du Verdier. As the clock struck two, the rock's egg lamp was extinguished and the curtains fell, leaving the lingering guests in total darkness. I call that about the broadest hint our fair hostess could give us, said the editor of a famous Parisian paper, and there was a good deal of talk and laughter from the Bohemian band during some minutes of darkness, at the end of which interval the curtains were drawn back again by invisible hands, and the last guests stroll through the empty tents to the drawing-room, where Dolores was waiting to bid good-night with the faithful dutuks to keep her company. Madame Quixada had retired within the last hour, and Pedro Perez had sneaked off to his own apartment soon after the opening of the supper-room. The editor of the Gare-aux-Saux was full of apologies. That is the worst of the brotherhood of letters, he said gaily. We are so fond of one another's society that it is much easier to assemble than to disperse us. Besides, who would be in a hurry to leave Fairyland? If it had not been for the sportiveness of the rock's egg, we should have lingered till the sun put that emblem of magic power to shame. I am sorry the lamp behaved so badly, said Dolores with an arch smile. Ah, madame, was there not a fairy in league with the lamp, a benevolent fairy who knows that we are hard-working journalists who can but snatch a few hours' rest between the tale of today's epigram and the head of tomorrows, and that we need the quiet of the night to elaborate the impromptu's of the day. I must apologize for my husband, gentlemen, said Dolores. He is not used to evening parties, so he's still away soon after midnight, leaving my mother and me to represent him. Jupiter need not apologize for retiring to his tent of clouds when he leaves Junot and Venus in his place, said the youngest of the Scribblers, and then each made his farewell bow till all were gone except Leon. He lingered with a determined air even after the Dutteux had bad good-night, the pianist rapturous at the success of our party. End of CHAPTERS XXVII and XXVIII. CHAPTERS XXIX AND THIRTY OF ONE LIFE, ONE LOVE by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. XXIX. Cruel as the grave. Leon du Verdi and his cousin were alone in the drawing room. Through the draped opening of the large central window the dimly-lighted marquee loomed shadowy and the tropical foliage had a somber air. The fountain had left off playing, the electric light had been turned off in all three tents, and the long vista of palms and flowers and tapestry and velvet-curtained archways took a funerial aspect, lighted only by a few small clusters of wax candles placed here and there amidst the foliage. Dolores looked at her cousin, stifled Leon, and walked slowly towards the bell beside the chimney-piece. "'I am sure you don't expect me to be inclined for conversation at this late hour, Leon,' she said coldly, "'so if you'll allow me I'll order your carriage.' "'Please don't take that useless trouble. I have no carriage. I came in a cab and dismissed it. I shall walk back to my hotel. You are not at your old address.' "'No, I am staying at the hotel Saint-Azare for a night or two. I am only in Paris as a bird of passage. I sail next week from Havre for Buenos Aires. I hope you will be more fortunate there than you appear to have been here,' said Dolores calmly. He was dumbfounded by the coolness of her reply. Could so brief a separation have worked such a change in the woman who only a few months ago had obviously adored him? He was silent for some moments. The tone of his reply was constrained. "'I congratulate you on the wisdom of your course since I left Paris,' he said. "'You have only followed my advice. I often told you that Pérez was devoted enough to marry you if you played your cards properly. Yes, he is devoted which is strange, and I am grateful which may seem even more extraordinary. And you are happy, I suppose. Yes, I am actually happy. But I hardly realized it till tonight how pleasant it is to be the wife of a millionaire. I am glad you have found out the value of wealth and that your experience has been on the sunny side of the question and not its dark side. I know the value of money from the lack of it, but I am now on a sure road to fortune. I have a better chance at a finer opening in Brazil than I ever had in my life. "'I congratulate you,' said Dolores. "'But I cannot grasp this golden opportunity without a certain capital in hand. Money makes money, Dolores. A man must sow the golden seed, if only a handful of gold dust, before he can reap the golden harvest. Fortune is at my door if I can let her in, but I must first find the key that will open the door.' "'Your conversation really abounds in allegories,' replied Dolores. "'But though the variations are new, the tune is always the same. No, Leon, I cannot provide you with a capital for your Brazilian venture. I mean to be a loyal wife to Pedro Perez, and I will do nothing under hand or secret, nothing that would awaken one jealous doubt in his mind. I know enough of his character to know that with him jealousy would be terrible. "'Then you will do nothing for me? You are wallowing in wealth, and you will not lift your finger to help me.' "'Oh, yes, I will do much more than lift my finger. Your new venture is to be made in South America, where my husband is a power. He knows every inch of the country, every speculation and enterprise that has been made there. I will introduce your scheme to him and ask him to help you. And you think he will help me? Yes, when I plead for you. I cannot wait for such a slow process as that, Dolores. I know what these old men are and how long they deliberate before they will trust a young man with a thousand pounds sterling, even if he could buy the philosopher's stone for the money and offer to share the profits of the transaction. I want money at once, Dolores. Can't you understand that two or three hundred pounds tonight would be worth a thousand next week? And I know you must have as much as that.' "'I have not the tenth part of two hundred pounds,' answered his cousin Cooley. I have everything in the world I can wish for, but since I have been Pedro's wife I have had hardly any money. I am Madame Perez. The name is enough. I can order anything I want from any tradesmen in Paris, and my name is all I need given exchange. Pedro pays my bills as fast as they come in. I have nothing to do with money, so you see if I were ever so willing to help you I couldn't do it.' There was a pause during which the man who called himself Lyon du Verdi took two or three turns up and down the room in troubled meditation. Then he stopped suddenly and confronted Dolores with a frowning brow. "'It is mere idle sophistication to talk to me in this strain,' he said. "'You can help me if you like and you know it. If you have not banknotes or gold you have moneys worth. You have jewels which I could turn into immediate cash at the Mont-de-Piedté. I only ask for the loan of a few of your Gugas, those you value least, that I may raise money upon them for a month or so. I will remit the money to a friend in Paris as soon as I am in funds, and the jewels shall be safely delivered into your own hands at the hour in place which you yourself shall appoint. Will that do for you?' "'No, it will not. I will not trust you with one of my husband's gifts. Indeed I dare not. Pedro remembers every jewel he ever gave me, and asks me from time to time to wear particular ornaments. I should be disgraced if I could not comply with his request.' The argument which followed was long and angry. Leon grew desperate and he found Dolores firm in her refusal. "'You had better not goad me too far,' he hissed in her ear as she shrank from him, with her back against the angle of the low marble mantelpiece and her hands stretched towards the bell. It is a very small thing, I have asked of you. Yet the consequences of your refusal may be more disastrous than you can foresee. I may be tempted to throw up the sponge and to let the world know some secrets in my life and your mother's share in them. That revelation would be a worse disgrace for you than the loss of a diamond necklace.' He was gone, leaving Dolores mystified by his parting words but not greatly alarmed. It seemed to her that those words were an idle threat, and that all she had to do was to stand firm in her duty to her husband, who was powerful enough to protect her from her kinsman's malice. There was nothing in her past relations with Leon which could bring evil to her in the future. She had loved him with a sentimental girlish fancy which had been fostered by the monotony of her secluded existence. Now that she had begun to taste the sweets of life and to understand the omnipotence of wealth, she looked back and wondered at her girlhood's idle fancy. How could I have ever been blind to his selfishness and meanness, she wondered, when the outer door had closed upon her cousin. It was four o'clock upon a winter morning. The last faint glow had faded out of the logs and Dolores shivered in her splendor as she surveyed her dazzling image in the vast sheet of glass behind the loge al-Dinier filled with hyacinths and narcissists. The image which met her gaze was radiant with gems and brilliant coloring but the face under the jeweled turban was pale and weary. It has been a long, long night, she thought, but at last I have made my debut in Parisian society. Pérez Peru's wife is no longer a person to be hidden in an obscure lodging. The servants who had been sepping luxuriously in their own quarters now appeared, sober and serious of aspect, apparently intent upon the safe adjustment of locks and bolts and the putting away of stray valuables. The last glimmer of light had been extinguished in the marquise and tomorrow morning all that fairy scene would be taken to pieces, like a child's puzzle, and carted away while the rock's egg lamp would be sold at a sacrifice to some enterprising proprietor of cafe or music hall. The footman drew aside the plush curtains and shut the wide plate-glass window which fastened in the usual manner of French casements. And it may be that under the influence of truffled turkey and champagne he was somewhat uncertain in twisting the long brass bolt into its socket. "'Is all safe?' asked Dolores elicitously as she took up her ostrich fan and moved slowly towards the door. "'Yes, madame. Then you may go to bed, all of you.' "'Madame will require the services of Elise at her toilette. Not to-night. Tell her to bring me my chocolate at ten to-morrow morning and on no account to disturb me before that hour.' Now that the tension of supreme excitement was relaxed Dolores felt tired to death. She had been moving about among her guests and talking and laughing at every sally of wit or journalist, artist or actor for five mortal hours, to say nothing of those three quieter hours during which she had presided at her husband's dinner party. She could hardly crawl upstairs to her luxurious bedroom, and she was far too weary to submit to the somewhat oppressive attentions of a highly trained lady's maid, a maid who had lived but lately with agate old age, which required to be put together bit by bit, and composed and painted into a ghastly semblance of youth and beauty. She had but just strength to unclasp her jewels, her necklace of matchless pearls, the stars and clusters and hearts and horseshoes of diamonds, emeralds and sapphires which sudded her bodice, the crescents which flashed from her dark hair. She was just able to take off all these splendors and to drop them in a careless heap upon her dressing table, and then she exchanged her silk and garment for a loose muslin peignoir, threw back the satin-covered idredown and flung herself upon her bed, overcome with sleep. All was still upon that upper floor. Pedro Perez was sleeping the tranquil slumber of the man who knows that all his investments are safe and that some of them are yielding him fifteen percent. Pam Quijada was sleeping the heavy sleep of senses stupefied by Cloral. The servants had crept up to their attics in the Italian roof, that these cubicula were cold in winter and hot in summer had but little disturbed the repose of the architect who planned the villa. And on all eyelids in the house sleep lay heavy, save in that one modest chamber where Louise Marseille lay in her narrow bed, and turned upon her pillow from time to time in the long intervals between her brief slumbers. The time was when the tired workgirl's night had been a night of a single sleep. But since that malady in which reason had been nearly wrecked in the agonized brain, Louise had never known what it was to enjoy long and tranquil slumbers. Tonight her nerves had been shaken by the noises within and without the house, the din of talk and laughter, the rattle of silver and glass, the loud music of a brass band playing waltzes and misercas, the sound of singing and the role of carriage-wheels. Gaity of this kind had lost all fascination for her. She had never tasted such pleasures, and she had no curiosity about that brilliant world of the rich and well-born in which she had had no part. Her day of happiness had been as brief as a butterfly's summer, her pleasures had been of the simplest. She had known the passion of love only in its most ideal aspect. She had never been sickened by the reverse of the picture. The man she had exalted into a hero had been her hero to the end of his life, and her regret for him was so much the keener that she had never had cause to doubt his honor or his worthiness to be loved. Thus the girl's innocent love of a summer day had become the settled worship of a lost lover, and the woman's heart was dead to all but the broken dream of the love-sick girl. Darkness closed round the villa in the bois in those chill hours between night and morning, bitter cold in the garden outside, but tempered within these walls by the calorie fowl in the basement. There were only two lamps burning in the house. One, the colored glass lantern in the hall, where the lowered gas gave a subdued glimmer that made the shadows blacker on the staircase and landing. The other, the little antique silver lamp that hung above the bed where Dolores lay in the happy sleep of youth and health and a heart at ease. Not a sound in that sleeping household saved the striking of various clocks with more or less musical chime. Five o'clock. Yes, there is another sound. As the hammer falls on the gong for the fifth time, there is a sound of a window opening softly and slowly on the ground floor, then a pause, and then the cautious opening of a door, another pause, and again another sound, the stealthy tread of a lightly shod feet on the velvet pile of the staircase. Louise Mercier hears those sounds faintly in her sleep. Are the servants going down already? It is early for them, considering the lateness of the hour at which they went to rest. She is sleeping somewhat more deeply than usual, worn out by the noises that kept her awake till an hour or so ago. It is her habit to rise when the servants go down in the morning to be as early as the earliest of the household and to see that the day's work is begun betimes. But this morning her senses are dull. She mixes the sounds of those footsteps with a confused dream of the past. It is a summer Sunday morning and her kindly neighbors coming to call her that she may be up and dressed and away to the station of Saint-Lazare to meet the kindly Englishman for that promised excursion to Marley-LaRois. Fond dream of days long vanished, fancy bridges the dismal gulf of years and the grave where her lover lies, and she hears his voice and sees his face again just as she heard and saw him more than twenty years ago. Suddenly the face fades, the voice is silent. She starts up in her bed shuddering, her blood turned to ice at the sound of a woman's shriek, either of fear or pain. She springs from her bed, throws on the peignoir that lies ready in the chair closed by, and moves out to the landing and to her cousin's room. The door is open and in the dim light of the night lamp she sees a white figure lying on the carpet face downwards, and, standing by the dressing table, she sees her brother engaged in thrusting the heaped up jewels into his pockets. While she pauses in the doorway, transfixed, he crams the last of the ornaments out of sight and turns to leave the room without one glance at the prostrate form near the bed. He recoils with an angry oath at the sight of Louise. Stand out of the way, he says savagely, or I'll settle you as I've settled her. Thief, murderer! Bosh! She's only stunned. It'll be worse for you than for her if you don't hold your tongue. Let me pass, I say. Not with those jewels in your possession, she says, facing him fearlessly. Before he can prevent her she has locked the door and put the key in her pocket. Thief, and murderer! Your first crime has gone unpunished because my voice has not been lifted up against you, but there shall be no second crime that I can hinder. I am trusted in this house and I mean to protect my cousin's property. If you have killed her, your life shall pay for hers. You shall not leave this room till you have given up those jewels and until I see if she is living or dead. She moves towards the figure on the ground and as she does so he looks round and grasps a situation. There is no other way out of the room. The only other door stands wide open revealing the interior of a bathroom in which there is no door, only a great marble bath and white paneled walls. He grasps Louise by the shoulder and snatches the key from the wide pocket of her dressing-gown. Stand aside and keep a quiet tongue in your head. He whispers threateningly and then as she clings about him, clutching the collar of his coat, holding him with all the force of excitement that has reached fever pitch, he sees her head flung back and her lips parting in a cry for help. Another instant and she will raise the house. A cruel blow from his clenched hands stifles the cry upon her whitening lips and then the same deadly hand snatches a knife from his breast pocket, a knife that opens with a spring, a thrust and another and then he grows mad with rage, the blind and reasoning fury of a savage beast as the lips still strive to cry aloud and the eyes still stare at him wildly and the clinging hand still hold him and so another and yet another thrust of the murderous knife till one last gurgling sound escapes from those distorted lips the stare grows fixed and dull, the fingers loosen and the bleeding form falls at his feet. He unlocks the door and runs downstairs, splashed with her blood, ace sisters life blood and creeps out by the way he came in, stealing through the empty tents, spurning the fading flowers as he dashes out into the cold night through the silk and draperies that mark an opening in the canvas. He did not mean murder when he entered the house, least of all a sister's murder, but he meant plunder and he has secured the booty. At daybreak he will leave for Dunkirk, from Dunkirk to Holland where he will dispose of the gems minus their delicate Tiffany settings. Just at the last moment he remembers that he must hide the blood upon his clothes. The stains are darkest and biggest upon his shirt and waistcoat as his victim clung about him in the death struggle. He creeps back into the house finds some overcoats hanging in a vestibule and takes an Invernus which is just long enough to hide his figure to the knees. This precaution is unlucky, for in going out into the garden he falls into the arms of a gendarme, who riding quietly by in the night silence had noticed the opening of the little door in the marquee. The gendarme dismounts and waits to see who will emerge from that mysterious little door at a quarter past five in the morning. And so, Léon du Verdier, alias Claude Morel, falls into the clutches of the law and is shut up, au secret, in a fallen cell, to be taken out at intervals and interrogated by the juge d'instruction. And before night, all Paris knows that there has been a daring robbery and a brutal murder in Pérez's Peruse villa that the beautiful Madame Pérez had been struck to the ground senseless in the attempt to protect her matchless jewels from a burglar and lies in a precarious condition and that poor old Pérez is half mad with grief and anxiety. 30. Daisy's Diary It is almost a month since I last opened this book, a month which has brought me daily nearer and nearer in union with him who is to share all my life in whom I am to love and obey. Yes, obey. The word suggests not the faintest sense of humiliation. I am proud to have a master, such a master. I never had that kind of feeling with my poor dear Cyril. On the contrary, I felt as if he had been given to me as my slave, a person to order about. For the first few days after that terrible revelation about my stepfather I kept my ghastly secret. I could not trust even him who I had trusted with my whole heart and my whole life. I feared that if I told Gilbert my conviction of Ambrose Arden's guilt, if I showed him how link by link the chain of circumstantial evidence could be put together until the circle was complete, he might consider it his duty to bring about a public investigation and thus condemn my mother to the horror of knowing what manner of man she had married. But after torturing myself for those few days of puzzled thought and nights of feverish unrest I could bear my burden no longer. Gilbert saw that there was something amiss with me that even his presence could not make me happy and he urged me to confide in him. And so I told him all the dismal story and my reasons for believing that my father's murder had been plotted by his friend. I could see by his darkening countenance as he listened that he was of my opinion, but he answered gravely and deliberately. Your theory is plausible, Daisy, yet there is no incident in life which may not bear a double interpretation. I certainly believed Valdie to be the murderer, as surely as I believe him to be Claude Morel under another name, and granting that he is the guilty man it is assuredly a strange thing that he should dog your stepfather's footsteps in this quiet place, and that your lover should renounce the happiness of his life and go into exile after overhearing a conversation between his father and that man. The links are strong links, but the evidence is not of a kind that would be accepted in a court of law, and I doubt if the law will ever touch the man whose moral guilt, granting him guilty, is greater than the guilt of the shudder of blood. I don't want the law to touch him. I don't want my mother ever to know how cruelly she has been cheated and deceived. I only want you to understand the horror of it all, and that this man with whom I have to live in daily friendship, or the appearance of friendship, is of all men upon earth the most abhorrent to me. Half the weight of my burden was lifted off my shoulders after I had shared my trouble with Gilbert. He is so wise, so thoughtful, so just and temperate in his judgment. He would not allow that the case was established against that wretched man. It was a case for grave doubt, he told me. The circumstances were full of darkest suspicion, but it would be dangerous to condemn a fellow creature above all a friend to whom I owed so much upon such evidence. I shuddered at the word friend. Oh, I was so fond of him once, I said. I used to sit upon his knee and put my arms round his neck. I called him Uncle because I could not bear to think that he was not related to me. I used to run from my father to him and one was almost as dear to me as the other. And now, to know that he is utterly base, false, and cruel, inexorably cruel, cruel as death itself. We know nothing, Daisy, said my dearest, in his calm, grave voice. There is nothing absolute or conclusive in all your evidence. The signs of trouble of mind which you have noticed in your stepfather may be only the indications of physical disease. We must wait and watch, if need be, and whether this dire suspicion of yours be brought more fully home to us, or whether we have reason to doubt the grounds upon which at rest there is at least one point upon which we have no hesitation. The knowledge of evil must be kept from your mother. I was inexpressibly comforted by his counsel and felt that I could better endure to live in the same house with my stepfather. I even began to falter somewhat in my judgment of him. And had it not been for the mystery of Cyril's conduct, which I could account for in no other manner, I might have thought myself the victim of a delusion, cruel alike to me and to the man whom I suspected. But I could not forget the evidence of Cyril's face which told of dire calamity, or the stern resolve with which he cancelled the bond between us. His tone and manner were those of a man who was fulfilling a painful duty who submitted himself to a cruel destiny. Nor was there other and nearer evidence wanting in my stepfather's manner to me after the change in my manner to him, which must have been obvious, although I set a watch upon myself always in my mother's presence. On the rare occasions when Mr. Arden and I were alone together I maintained a resolute silence, and on no such occasion did he ever question me as to my altered bearing. It seemed to me that he submitted to our estrangement as a part of his doom and that he tacitly accepted my condemnation of him. Not by one word or look did he ever seek to evoke the old tenderness of our relations. He who until a few weeks ago had been to me as a second father was content to become a stranger and to endure the insult of my sullen silence, content also to play the hypocrite in his wife's presence and to effect that he and I were on the old affectionate terms. When mother asked me to play to him he praised my playing and asked for this or that sonata or set of variations. Oh, what a dreadful life it would be if it were not for the comfort and support my true lover has given me throughout this trial. And all this time there has been an air of gaiety at River Lawn and mother and Gilbert and I have been full of preparations for the great change in our lives. It will not be such a change for mother and me though as it might have been under less blessed conditions, for I shall be her next door neighbor and shall be running in and out of the dear home garden every day and she can run into my gardens and the ever lovely and beloved arbor where my sovereign lord and king first declared his love can be common ground for both of us. I shall keep copies of my most adorable poets there and a sketching block and color box and Gilbert shall have a box of cigars or cigarettes and the handy little cupboard where I used to keep my toy cups and saucers when I was a child. No. My wedding day will bring no severance between mother and me and by and by when the end which I foresee shall come and the shadow is lifted from her life I shall have that dear mother all to myself again as I had in the tranquil years of her widowhood it is wicked perhaps to take comfort in the thought of anyone's death yet can I wish a traitor's life to be prolonged can I fail to see the hand of God in that gradual darkening of the gloom which encircles him the gradual working of that slow poison we call remorse again there has been talk of my true so and this time mother has not found me cold or indifferent I have taken a keen delight in everything especially the house linen about which I am as earnest as if I had spun it myself like an industrious Swedish or Norwegian maiden and had hoarded it in great oak and presses to await my betrothal I am delighted to say that Gilbert's hereditary linen closet exhibits a vast collection of rags beautiful Irish to mask tablecloth with the florist on coat of arms woven in the fabric smooth and lustrous as satin but as transparent as gauze when the good old housekeeper held them up to the light single gentlemen never do think of such things she said apologetically I've told Mr. Florist on often and often that new tablecloths were wanted but he always forgot to order them and then he was here so seldom and that made him careless about the house of course I cried what should he know about tablecloths and then mother and I held a grand consultation and selected the loveliest patterns and sent off a big order to a firm in Belfast and I felt that I was encouraging the manufacturers of the sister aisle there are Irish poplents in my true so too soft lustrous delicious warm and substantial wear for my winter honeymoon mother thinks of everything seasons and occasions comfort and dignity without folly or extravagance my true so will be perfect worthy to be exhibited as an example of sturning British common sense as opposed to French frivolity and American ostentation we are to go to the south for our honeymoon but not straight away to fashionable can or cosmopolitan niece we are to go first to Bordeaux and then to Poe and be at its and afterwards to Toulouse Carcassonne Nîmes Arles and so on by easy stages to mersey and then to can just to wind up with the Prince of Wales week and the dances at the two clubs I shall be an old married woman by that time capable of shaper owning my unmarried cousins if they should happen to be at can with my aunt just then they generally go south in early spring and leave the doctor to make money in Harley Street they all came down to River lawn last week to congratulate me upon my promotion as flora called it and they all and included seem to think I have done a grand thing in getting myself engaged to Gilbert Florestan not because he is rich explained flora for measured by our modern necessities he is little better than a popper but because he is unmistakably county your relations never need be ashamed of him that is a comfort said I enraged at her impertence but I hope you don't suppose I accepted Gilbert in order to gratify my relations or come up to the requirements of Harley Street I did not accept him because he is county and I should have been just as deeply in love with him if he had been a beggar you may think so and most engaged girls talk in that style said flora but I have never heard of anybody in society marrying a beggar since the time of King Kofetua and no doubt he was sorry for it afterwards these cousins of mine are the very essence of worldliness and I seldom stoop to argue about matters of feeling with either of them they have been on the point of making great matches ever since they were presented but the business has always stopped short of actuality and aunt Emily says that marriage from a lady's standpoint will soon become impossible it is easy enough for an only child like you she said of course you are anybody's money but my poor girls have nothing but their beauty and their accomplishments and men nowadays are utterly sordid this was a speech which would have made me wretched were it possible for me to doubt my true lover but all the discontented mothers in England might hint and insinuate for a live long summer day without ruffling my great content my heart so far as Gilbert is concerned is as placid as a summer lake encircled by mountains end of chapters 29 and 30