_ PART I CHAPTER XIX. THE REVELATION
It was certainly a perfect day for a cruise. The sea lay blue and still as a lake, so clear that the rocks made purple shadows in its crystal depths. Under any other circumstances, Olga would have revelled in the beauty of it, but there was no enjoyment for her that day. She stood on the deck of the yacht as she steamed away from the jetty, and watched the uneven shore recede with a feeling of impotence that was not without an element of fear. For it seemed to her that she was a prisoner, looking her last upon the liberty of her youth.
The vessel was of no inconsiderable size and moved swiftly through the still water, cleaving her way like a bird through space. It was not long before they passed the jutting headland that hid the little fishing-village from view; but Olga still stood motionless at the rail, fighting down the cold dread at her heart.
She could hear Violet's voice on the other side of the deck, gaily chattering to Hunt-Goring. The scent of their cigarettes reached her, and she clenched her hands. She was sure now that he had been supplying Violet with them secretly. She had been too deeply engrossed with her own affairs to think of this before, and bitterly did she blame herself for this absorption.
Poor Olga! It was the prelude to a life-long self-reproach.
They were heading out to sea now, running smoothly into the glaring sunshine. It poured upon her mercilessly where she stood, but she was scarcely aware of it. She gazed backward at the shore with eyes that saw not.
Suddenly a soft voice spoke at her shoulder. "What! Still sulking? Do you know you are remarkably like a boy?"
She turned with a great start, meeting the eyes she feared. "I don't know what you mean," she said, drawing sharply back.
He laughed his smooth, easy laugh. "I mean that you are behaving like a cub in need of chastisement. Do you seriously think I am going to put up with it--from a chit like you?"
She looked him up and down with a single flashing glance of clear scorn. "How much do you think I am going to put up with?" she said.
He leaned his arms upon the rail in an attitude of supreme complacence. "I may be the villain of the piece," he observed, "but I have no desire to be melodramatic. I have come over here to talk to you quietly and sensibly about the future. Of course if you--"
"What have you to do with my future?" she thrust in fiercely. She would have given all she had to be calm at that moment, but calmness was beyond her. Though her fear had utterly departed, she was quivering with indignation from head to foot.
Hunt-Goring kept his face turned downwards towards the swirl of water that leaped by them. He was quite plainly prepared for the question.
"Since you ask me," he responded coolly, "I should say--a good deal."
"In what way?" she demanded.
She could see that he was still smiling--that maddening, perpetual smile, and she thought that her sheer abhorrence of the man would choke her. But with all her throbbing strength she held herself in check.
He did not answer her at once. She waited, compelling herself to silence.
At length quite calmly he turned and faced her. "Well now, Olga, listen to me," he said. "I am a good deal older than you are, but I am still capable of a certain amount of foolishness. What I am now going to say to you, I have wanted to say for some time, but you have been so absurdly shy with me that--as you perceive--I have been obliged to resort to strategy to obtain a hearing."
He paused, for Olga had suddenly gripped the rail as if she needed support. Her face was deathly, but out of it the pale eyes blazed in fierce questioning.
"What do you mean?" she said. "What strategy?"
He laid his hand upon hers and gripped it hard. "Don't be hysterical!" he said. "I am paying you the compliment of treating you like a woman of sense."
She shrank away from him, but he continued to grip her hand with brutal force till the pain of it reached her consciousness and sent the blood upwards to her face. Then he let her go.
"Yes," he said coolly, "I have been laying my mine for some time now. It has not been particularly easy or particularly pleasant, but since I considered you worth a little trouble I did not grudge it. The long and the short of it is this: I fell in love with you last winter. You may remember that I caught your brothers poaching on my ground, and you came to me to beg them off. Well, I granted your request--for a consideration. You may remember the consideration also. You had been at great pains to snub me until that episode. I made you pay for the snubbing. I imposed a fine--do you remember?"
"I have loathed you ever since," she broke in.
"Oh, yes," he said. "I know that. That was what started the mischief. I am so constituted that resistance is but fuel to the flame. In that respect I believe I am not unique. It is a by no means remarkable trait of the masculine character, you will find. Well, I made you pay. It was to be two kisses, was it not? You gave me one, and then for some reason you fled. That left you in my debt."
"It is a debt I will never pay!" she declared passionately. "I will die first!"
He laughed. There was something in his eyes--something intolerable--that made her avert her own in spite of herself. In desperation she glanced around for Violet.
"She is asleep," said Hunt-Goring.
She turned on him then like a fury. "You mean you have drugged her!" she cried.
He shrugged his shoulders. "Not to that extent. You can wake her if you wish, but I think you had better hear me out first--for her sake also. It is better for all parties that we should come to a clear understanding."
With immense effort she controlled herself. "Very well. What do you wish me to understand?"
"Simply this," said Hunt-Goring. "I know very well that your engagement to Wyndham was simply a move in the game, and that you have not the faintest intention of marrying him. That is so, I think?"
She was silent, taken by surprise.
"I thought so," he continued. "You see, I am not so easy to hoodwink. And now I am going to act up to my villain's _role_ and break that engagement of yours--which is no engagement. To put it quite shortly and comprehensibly--I am going to marry you myself."
She stared at him in gasping astonishment. "You!" she said. "You!"
He laughed into her eyes of horror. "You will soon get used to the idea," he said. "You see, Wyndham doesn't really want you, and I do. That is the one extenuating circumstance of my villainy. I want you so badly that I don't much care what steps I take to get you. And so long as you continue to hate me as heartily as you do now, just by so much shall I continue to want you. Is that quite plain?"
She was still staring at him in open repulsion. "And you think I would marry you?" she said breathlessly. "You think I would marry you?"
"I think you will have to," said Hunt-Goring, with his silky laugh. "I love you, you see." He added, after a moment, "I shan't be unkind to you if you behave reasonably. I am well off. I can give you practically anything you want. Of course you will have to give also; but that goes without saying. The point is, how soon can we be married?"
"Never!" she cried vehemently. "Never! Never!"
He looked at her, and again her eyes fell; but she continued, nevertheless, with less of violence but more of force.
"I don't know what you mean by suggesting such a thing. I think you must be quite mad--as I should be if I took you seriously. I am not going to marry you, Major Hunt-Goring. I have never liked you, and I never shall. You force me to speak plainly, and so I am telling you the simple truth."
"Thank you," said Hunt-Goring. "Well, now, let us see if I can persuade you to change your mind."
"You will never do that," she said quickly.
He smiled. "I wonder! Anyhow, let me try! It makes no difference to you that I love you?"
"No," she told him flatly. "None whatever. In fact, I don't believe it."
"I will prove it to you one day," he said. "But let that pass now, since it has no weight with you. I quite realize that I shall not persuade you to marry me for your own sake or for mine. But--I think you may be induced to consider the matter for the sake of--your friend."
"In what way?" Breathlessly she asked the Question. for again it was as if a warning voice spoke within her, bidding her to go warily.
He paused a moment. Then: "Has it never struck you that there is something rather--peculiar--about her?" he asked suavely.
She brought her eyes back to his in sharp apprehension. "Peculiar? No, never! What do you mean?"
"Are you quite sure of that?" he insisted.
She began to falter in spite of herself. "Never, until--until quite lately. Never till you gave her those--abominable--cigarettes."
"Believe me, there is no harm whatever in those cigarettes," he said. "I smoke them myself constantly. Try them for yourself if you don't believe me. They contain a minute quantity of opium, it is true, but only sufficient to soothe the nerves. No, those cigarettes are not responsible. That peculiarity which you have recently begun to notice is due to quite another cause. Surely you must have always known that she was different from other girls. Have you never thought her excitable, even unaccountable in some of her actions? Has she never told you of strange fancies, strange dreams? And her restlessness, her odd whims, her insatiable craving for morbid horrors, have you never taken note of these?"
He spoke with deliberate emphasis, narrowly watching the effect of his words.
Olga's hands were gripped fast together; her wide eyes searched his face.
"Oh, tell me what you mean!" she entreated, a piteous quiver in her voice. "Tell me plainly what you mean!"
"I will," he said. "Violet Campion's mother was a homicidal maniac. She killed her husband--this girl's father--in a fit of madness one night three months after their marriage. It happened in India, and was put down to native treachery in order to hush it up, but it was well known that no native was responsible for it. During the six months that followed, she was kept under restraint, hopelessly insane. It was in her blood--the worst form of insanity known. At the birth of the child she died. That will explain to you my exact meaning, and if you need corroboration you can go to Max Wyndham for it. She has begun to develop symptoms of her mother's complaint. All her peculiarities arise from incipient madness!"
"Oh, no!" Olga whispered, with fingers straining against each other. "It's not possible! It's not true!"
"It is absolutely true," he said. "And you know it is true. At the same time it is just possible that the disease may be arrested. Wyndham himself will tell you this. We discussed the matter quite recently. It may be arrested even for years if nothing happens to precipitate it. Of course her people will never let her marry, but she is not, I fancy, the sort of young woman to whom wedded bliss is essential. Naturally, all this has been kept from her. There are not many people who know of it. I am one, because I knew her mother both before and after her marriage, being a young subaltern at the time and stationed at the very place where the tragedy occurred. Wyndham is another, being the _protege_ of Kersley Whitton to whom the girl's mother was engaged and who was the first to discover the fatal tendency. She married Campion mainly out of pique because Whitton threw her over. He was a man of sixty, and his son was grown up at the time. I have often thought that he behaved with remarkable magnanimity when he adopted the child of the woman who had murdered his father."
Olga shivered suddenly and violently. The horror of the tale had turned her cold from head to foot. She no longer questioned the truth of it. She knew beyond all doubting that it was true.
The sun still shone gloriously, and the yacht slipped on through the shining water, throwing up the sparkling foam as she went. But to Olga the whole world had become a place of darkness and of the shadow of death. Whichever way she turned, she was afraid.
"Oh, why have you told me?" she said at last. "Why--why have you told me?"
"Can't you guess?" said Hunt-Goring.
"No!" Yet her breath came sharply with the word. If she did not guess, she feared.
He looked down at her for the first time unsmiling. "I have told you," he said, "that I mean to marry you, and--in keeping with the part of villain which you have assigned to me--I don't much care what I do to get you."
She met his look with all her quivering courage. "But what has this to do with that?" she said.
She saw his face harden, become cruel. "Miss Campion is nothing to me," he said brutally. "Either you give me your most sacred promise to marry me before the end of the year, or--I shall tell her the truth here and now, as I have just told it to you."
She shrank as though he had struck her. "Oh, you couldn't!" she cried out wildly. "You couldn't! No man could be such a fiend!"
He came a step nearer to her, and suddenly his eyes glowed with a fire that scorched her to the soul. "You had better not tempt me!" he said. "Or I may do that--and more also!"
She put her hands up to shield her face from his look, but he caught them suddenly and savagely into his own, overbearing her resistance with indomitable mastery.
"Promise me!" he said. "Promise me!"
His lips were horribly near her own. She strained away from him tensely, with all her strength. "I will not!" she panted. "I will not!"
"You shall!" he declared furiously. "Do you think I will be beaten by a child like you? I tell you, you shall!"
But still desperately she struggled against him, repeating voicelessly, "I will not! I will not!"
He gripped her fast, holding her face up mercilessly to his own. "You think I won't do it?" he said.
"I know you won't!" she gasped back. "You couldn't! No man--no man could!"
"I swear to you that I will!" he said.
"No!" she breathed. "No! No! No!"
She saw the fury on his face suddenly harden and turn cold. Abruptly he set her free.
"Very well," he said. "Marry you I will. But first I will show you that I am a man of my word."
He swung round upon his heel to leave her. But in that instant the warning voice cried out again in Olga's soul, compelling her to swift action. She sprang after him, caught his arm, clinging to it with all her failing strength.
"You will not!" she gasped out in an agony of entreaty. "You could not! You shall not!"
He stopped, looking down without pity into her face of supplication. "Then give me that promise!" he said.
She shook her head. "No, not that--not that!"
"Why not?" he insisted. "Are you hoping to catch your red-haired doctor? You are not likely to secure anyone else, and he will probably prove elusive."
She flinched at the gibing words, but still she held him back. "No, no! I don't want to marry anyone. I have always said so."
"Have you said so to him?" asked Hunt-Goring.
She was silent, but the quick blood ran to her temples betraying her.
"I thought not," he said. "So that is the explanation, is it? That is why you will have none of me, eh?"
"Oh, how can you be so hateful?" she cried vehemently.
He laughed. "You won't let me be anything else, I assure you I would be amiability itself if you would permit. Well now, which is it to be? You say you don't want to marry anyone. That, we have seen, is only a figure of speech. But since the red-haired doctor is not wanting you and I am--"
"You are wrong!" she broke in, with sudden heat.
Some hidden fire within her had kindled into flame at his words; it burned with a fierce strength. For the first time she challenged him without any sense of fear.
He looked at her in unfeigned astonishment. "I beg your pardon?"
"You are wrong!" she said again, and it was as if some inner force inspired the words. She spoke without conscious volition of her own. "Max Wyndham has asked me to marry him--and marry him I will!"
She never knew with what triumphant finality she spoke, but the effect of her words was instant and terrible. Even as they left her lips, she saw the dark blood rise in a wave to his forehead, swelling the veins there to purple cords. His eyes became suddenly bloodshot and glittered devilishly. His hands clenched, and she almost thought he was going to strike her.
With a desperate effort she faced him without a tremor, instinctively aware that courage alone could save her.
For fully thirty seconds he said no word, and as they slipped away she saw the dreadful wave of passion gradually recede. But even then he continued to glare at her till with a quiet movement she took her hand from his arm and turned away.
Then, as she stood at the deck-rail, at last he spoke. "So that is your last word upon the subject?"
She answered him briefly, "Yes."
She kept her face turned seawards. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly conscious of bodily weakness. All her strength seemed to have gone into that one great effort, that at the moment had seemed no effort at all. She felt as if she were going to faint, and gripped herself with all her quivering resolution, praying wildly that he might not notice.
He did not notice. For a few seconds more he stood behind her, while she waited, palpitating, for his next move. Then, very suddenly he turned and left her.
And Olga, instantly relaxing from a tension too terrible to be born, covered her face with her hands and shuddered over and over again in sick disgust.
It was many minutes before she recovered, minutes during which her mind seemed to be almost too stunned for thought. Very gradually at length she began to remember the words she had last uttered, the weapon she had used; and numbly she wondered at herself.
No, she had scarcely acted on her own initiative. Her action had been prompted by some force of which till that moment she had had no knowledge, a force great enough to lift her above her own natural impulses, great enough to help her in her sore strait, and to make all other things seem of small importance.
What would Max have said to that emphatic declaration of hers? But surely it was Max, and none other, who had inspired it. Surely--surely--ah, what was this that was happening to her? What magic was at work? She suddenly lifted her face to the dazzling summer sky. A brief giddiness possessed her--and passed. She was as one over whom a mighty wave had dashed. She came up from it, breathless, trembling, yet with a throbbing ecstasy at her heart such as she had never known before. For the impossible had happened to her. She realized it now. She--Olga Ratcliffe, the ordinary, the colourless, the prosaic--was caught in the grip of the Unknown Power, that Immortal Wonder which for lack of a better name men call Romance. And she knew it, she exulted in it, she stretched out her woman's hands to grasp it, as a babe will seek to grasp the sunshine, possessing and possessed.
In that moment she acknowledged that the bitter struggle through which she had just come had been indeed worth while. It had exhausted her, terrified her; but it had shown her her heart in such a fashion as to leave no room for doubt or misunderstanding. Even yet she quivered with the rapture of the revelation. It thrilled her through and through. For she knew that Max Wyndham reigned there in complete and undisputed possession. No other man had entered before him, or would ever enter after....
Slowly, reluctantly, she came back from her Elysium. She descended to earth and faced again the difficulties of the way.
She opened her eyes upon the yacht still running seawards, and decided that they must turn. She wondered if Hunt-Goring had regained his self-control, if he were ashamed of himself, if possibly he might bring himself to apologize, and what she should say to him if he did. Her heart felt very full. She knew she could not be very severe with him if he were really repentant.
Then she remembered Violet,--her friend.... _