Cynthia found him lying in a darkened
room. The nurse had just raised some of the blinds;
a dismal day was drawing to its close, and more light
was needed ere she could distinguish marked bottles,
and doses, and the rest of the appurtenances of dangerous
illness.
An English nurse would have forbidden
the presence of a stranger; this French one acted
with more discretion if less of strict science.
“Madam is his sister, perhaps?” she whispered.
“No.”
“A relative, then?”
“No; a woman who loves him.”
That heartbroken admission told the
whole tale to the quick-witted Frenchwoman. There
had been a duel; one man was seriously injured; the
other, she had heard, was also receiving medical attention
in another hotel the témoins, wistful
to avoid the interrogation of the law, had so arranged and
here was the woman who had caused the quarrel.
Well, such was the will of Providence!
These things had been since man and woman were expelled
from Paradise for the nurse, though a devout
Catholic, suspected that Genesis had suppressed certain
details of the first fratricide and would
continue, she supposed, until the Millennium.
She nodded cheerfully.
“There is every reason to hope,
but he must not be disturbed not excited,
that is,” she added, seeing the wan agony in
Cynthia’s face.
The girl tiptoed to the side of the
bed. Medenham’s eyes were closed, but he
was muttering something. She bent and kissed his
forehead, and a strange smile broke through the tense
lines of pain. Even in his semi-conscious state
he felt the touch of those exquisite lips.
“My Lady Alice!” he said.
She choked back a sob. He was
dreaming of “Comus” standing
with her in the ruined banqueting hall of Ludlow Castle.
“Yes, your Lady Alice,” she breathed.
A slight quiver shook him.
“Don’t tell Cynthia,”
he said brokenly. “She must never know....
Ah, if I hadn’t slipped, I would have quieted
his viperish tongue.... But Cynthia must not
know!”
“Oh, my dear, my dear, Cynthia
does know! It is you who know not. Kind
Heaven, let him live! Grant that I may tell him
all that I know!”
She could not help it; the words welled
forth of their own accord; but the nurse touched her
arm gently.
“It is a little fever,”
she whispered with ready sympathy. “Soon
it will pass. He will sleep, and, when he awakes,
it is perhaps permissible that you should speak to
him.”
Well, it was permissible. The
age of miracles had not passed for those two.
Even the experienced doctor marveled at the strength
of a man who at four o’clock in the morning
could have a sword driven through the tissues in perilous
proximity to the right lung, and yet, at nine o’clock
on that same night, was able to announce an unalterable
resolution to get up and dress for breakfast next day.
That, of course, was a pleasing fiction intended for
Cynthia’s benefit. It served its purpose
admirably. The kindly nurse displayed an unexpected
firmness in leading her to her own room, there to eat
and sleep.
For Cynthia had an ordeal to face.
Many things had been said in the car during that mad
rush to Folkestone, and on board the steamer which
ferried Dale and herself to Boulogne she had wrung
from the taciturn chauffeur a full, true, and particular
account of Medenham, his family, and his doings throughout
as much of his life as Dale either knew or guessed.
By the time they reached Boulogne she had made up her
mind with a characteristic decision. One long
telegram to her father, another to Lord Fairholme,
caused heart-burning and dismay not alone in certain
apartments of the Savoy Hotel, but in the aristocratic
aloofness of Cavendish Square and Curzon Street.
As a result, two elderly men, a younger one, in the
person of the Marquis of Scarland, and two tearful
women Lady St. Maur and Mrs. Leland met
at Charing Cross about one o’clock in the morning
to travel by special train and steamer. Another
woman telegraphed from Shropshire saying that baby
was better, and that she would follow by the first
steamer on Sunday. Mrs. Devar did not await developments.
She fled, dinnerless, to some burrow in Bayswater.
These alarums and excursions were
accompanied by the ringing of telephones and the flight
of carriages back and forth through muddy London,
and Cynthia was called on to deal with a whole sheaf
of telegrams which demanded replies either to Dover
or to Scarland Towers in Shropshire.
With a man like Vanrenen at one end,
however, and a woman like his daughter at the other,
it might be fairly assumed that even the most complex
skein of circumstances might be resolved from its tangle.
As a matter of curious coincidence, the vessel which
carried Marigny to England passed in mid-Channel its
sister ship conveying the grief-stricken party of
relatives to France. It happened, too, that the
clouds from the Atlantic elected to hover over Britain
rather than France, and when Cynthia stood on the
quay to meet the incoming steamer, a burst of sunshine
from the east gave promise of a fine if somewhat blustery
day.
Five pairs of eyes sought her face
anxiously while the vessel was warping to the quay
opposite the Gare Maritime. They looked
there for tidings, and they were not disappointed.
“That’s all right,”
said Vanrenen with an unwonted huskiness in his voice.
“Cynthia wouldn’t smile if she hadn’t
good news.”
“Thank God for that!”
muttered the Earl, bending his head to examine a landing
ticket, the clear type of which he was utterly unable
to read.
“I never thought for a minute
that any Frenchman could kill George,” cried
Scarland cheerfully.
But the two women said nothing, could
see nothing, and the white-faced but smiling Cynthia
standing near the shoreward end of the gangway had
vanished in a sudden mist.
Of course, Marigny was right when
he foresaw that Vanrenen could not meet either Medenham
or any of his relatives for five minutes without his
“poor little cobweb of intrigue” being
dissipated once and forever.
With the marvelous insight that every
woman possesses when dealing with the affairs of the
man she loves, Cynthia combined the eloquence of an
orator with the practiced skill of a clever lawyer
in revealing each turn and twist of the toils which
had enveloped her since that day in Paris when her
father happened to suggest in Marigny’s hearing
that she might utilize his hired car for a tour in
England, while he concluded the business that was
detaining him in the French Capital. Nothing
escaped her; she unraveled every knot; Medenham’s
few broken words, supplemented by the letter to his
brother-in-law which he told her to obtain from Dale,
threw light on all the dark places.
But the gloom had fled. It was
a keenly interested, almost light-hearted, little
party that walked through the sunshine to the Hotel
de la Plage.
Dale, abashed, sheepish, yet oddly
confident that all was for the best in a queer world,
met the Earl of Fairholme later in the day; his lordship,
who had been pining for someone to pitch into, addressed
him sternly.
“This is a nice game you’ve
been playing,” he said. “I always
thought you were a man of steady habits, a little
given to horse-racing perhaps, but otherwise a decent
member of the community.”
“So I was before I met Viscount
Medenham, my lord,” was the daring answer.
For Dale was no fool, and he had long since seen how
certain apparently hostile forces had adapted themselves
to new conditions.
“Before you left him, you mean,”
growled the Earl. “What sort of sense was
there in letting him fight a duel? it could
have been stopped in fifty different ways.”
“Yes, my lord, but I never suspicioned
a word of it till he went off in the cab with them ”
The Earl held up a warning finger.
“Hush,” he said, “this
is France, remember, and you are the foreigner
here. Where is my son’s car?”
“In the garage at Folkestone, my lord.”
“Well, you had better cross
by an early boat to-morrow and bring it here.
You understand all the preliminaries, I suppose?
Find out from the Customs people what deposit is necessary,
and come to me for the money.”
So it happened that when Medenham
was able to take his first drive in the open air,
the Mercury awaited him and Cynthia at the door of
the hotel. It positively sparkled in the sunlight;
never was car more spick and span. The brasswork
scintillated, each cylinder was rhythmical, and a
microscope would not have revealed one speck of dust
on body or upholstery.
On a day in July for everybody
agreed that not even a marriage should be allowed
to interfere with the Scottish festival of St. Grouse that
same shining Mercury with the tonneau decorously cased
in glass for the hour, drew up at the edge of a red
carpet laid down from curb to stately porch of St.
George’s, Hanover Square, and Dale turned a
grinning face to the doorway when Viscount Medenham
led his bride down the steps through a shower of rice
and good wishes.
Wedding breakfasts and receptions
are all “much of a muchness,” as the Mad
Hatter said to another Alice, and it was not until
the Mercury was speeding north by west to Scarland
Towers, “lent to the happy pair for the honeymoon”
while Betty took the children to recuperate at the
seaside, that Cynthia felt she was really married.
“I have a bit of news for you,”
said her husband, taking a letter from his pocket.
“I received a letter by this morning’s
post. A heap of others remain unopened till you
and I have time to go through them; but this one caught
my attention, and I read it while I was dressing.”
He had an excellent excuse for putting
his arm round her waist while he held the open sheet
so that both might peruse it at the same time.
It ran:
MY DEAR VISCOUNT Of course
I meant to kill you, but fate decided otherwise.
Indeed, with my usual candor, which by this time
you may have learned to admire, I may add that only
the special kind of dog’s luck which attaches
itself to members of my family, saved me from
being killed by you. But that is ancient
history now.
I am glad to hear that your wound was
not really serious. There was no sense in
merely crippling you my only chance lay
in procuring your untimely demise. Having failed,
however, I want to tell you, with the utmost sincerity,
that I never had the slightest intention of carrying
out my abominable threat in regard to the fair
lady who is now Viscountess Medenham. Were
you other than a heavy-witted and thick-skinned
Briton, you would have known that I was goading
you into issuing a challenge.
This piece of information
is my wedding present; it is all I
can give, because, metaphorically
speaking, I haven’t a sou!
I am, as you see, domiciled in Brussels,
where my car is attached by an unsympathetic
hotel proprietor. Still, I am devoid of
rancor, and mean to keep a sharp eye for a well-favored
and well-dowered wife; such a one, in fact, as you
managed to snap up under my very nose.
With a thousand compliments,
I am,
Yours
very sincerely,
EDOUARD
MARIGNY.
P.S. Devar
went “steerage” to the United States when
he
heard of our affair.
He thought it was all up with you, and
with him.
“The wretch!” murmured
Cynthia. “Can he really believe even yet
that I would have married him?”
“I don’t care tuppence
what he believes,” said Medenham, giving her
a reassuring hug. “Indeed, I have a mind
to write and ask him how much he owes in that hotel.
Don’t you see, my dear, that if it hadn’t
been for Marigny there was a chance that I might have
left you at Bristol.”
“Never!” cooed Cynthia.
“Well, now I have got you, I
am beginning to imagine all sorts of terrible possibilities
which might have parted us. I remember thinking,
when my foot slipped....”
“Oh, don’t!” she
murmured. “I can’t bear to hear of
that. Sometimes, in Calais, I awoke screaming,
and then I knew I had seen it in my dreams....
There, you have disarranged my hat!... But I don’t
think much of your budget, anyhow; mine is
a great deal more to the point. My father told
me this morning that he is sure he will feel very
lonely now. He never meant, he said, to put anyone
in my dear mother’s place, but he will miss
me so greatly that, perhaps, Mrs. Leland ”
“By Jove,” cried Medenham,
“that will be splendid! I like Mrs. Leland.
At one time, do you know, I rather fancied she might
become my step-mother, now it seems I shall have to
greet her as a mother-in-law. She was bound to
come into the family one way or another. When
is it to be?”
Cynthia laughed delightedly.
“Father looked so confused
when I asked him. Say, wouldn’t it be a
joke if Simmonds brought them to Scarland Towers one
day, and they were announced by some solemn footman
as ’Mr. and Mrs. Vanrenen’?”
“Cynthia, you know,” he teased
her.
“I don’t know, but I am a good guesser,”
she said.
And she was.