Gwendolen Read online

  While he had been speaking, the gypsy had been scanning Gwendolen's palm, and at these last significantly uttered words she suddenly glanced up at Lord Wilfrid with a sly, derisive smile.

  "Aye, serve the purpose—that's the word for you, fair gentleman," she said impudently. "Mayhap you'd like me to read your palm, sir? It might save you a deal of trouble."

  "No, I want none of your mumbo-jumbo," Lord Wilfrid said coldly. "You may earn your silver by reading the young lady's palm, and predicting the usual fate of health, wealth, and a long, happy married life for her."

  "Aye, long," agreed the gypsy, again glancing at Gwendolen's hand, "and happy, but,"—looking up into Gwendolen's face—"stormy, pretty lady, stormy. You'll marry the best, but you'll give him no rest—and you'll travel far countries with him—"

  "Oh, how exciting it sounds!" Campaspe exclaimed. "Much better than mine!"

  "Excitement enough for the pair of you, miss," said the gypsy obligingly, and let her slanting gaze slide up to Lyndale's face. "And you, dark lord," she said to him as impertinently as she had spoken to Lord Wilfrid, "shall I tell you your fortune?"

  Lyndale grinned down at her. "I have an idea,” he said, "that you already have—haven't you? Here—"

  He tossed her another coin and she scrambled down from the carriage and melted into the crowd.

  "Now what did you mean by that?" Campaspe demanded. "She wouldn't say if the gentleman I am to marry is dark or fair, or if he is at all like you, so she can't have meant—"

  "Never mind what she meant," Lyndale said. "What I mean to do is to take you to the Duke's marquee, where we shall have a better view of these races. You have eaten quite enough, and Conqueror will be running soon."

  Lord Wilfrid at once said that he would escort his ladies there as well, but Jane, who cared nothing for the races and was disinclined to brave the crowd in order to make her way to the marquee, said if he did not mind she would merely move to the carriage on their other side, which was occupied by some old friends with whom she had spoken during the nuncheon, and remain there instead. Lord Wilfrid, scarcely troubling to conceal his satisfaction at this—for him—fortunate turn of events, assisted her with alacrity to her new place and then bore Gwendolen off in triumph.

  "How perceptive of your sister to leave us alone, fair charmer—I may call you fair charmer, mayn't I?" he drawled, as they made their way through the crowd. "I am feeling very seventeenth century today, you see."

  "Oh no, I don't mind," Gwendolen said, unfurling her sunshade and wondering if one could have an improper proposal made to one while strolling through a crowd of this magnitude. "I should quite adore to look seventeenth century myself, with my hair all in tight curls like Queen Henrietta Maria and a spaniel in my lap, but I'm afraid I am dreadfully modern at heart. I mean, if anyone were to call me Sacharissa, I should probably go into whoops."

  "So you say," murmured Lord Wilfrid in a lower voice, placing his free hand over the hand with which she lightly held his arm as they walked along and pressing it significantly. "So you say, fair charmer. But would you actually be more averse than any seventeenth-century damsel to being swept off your feet by a dashing cavalier and carried off across his saddlebow?"

  "A very uncomfortable mode of transportation, I should think," said Gwendolen in a perversely prosaic tone. "A nice, smart, modern phaeton would be much more the thing—"

  "Then a phaeton it shall be, my dearest Gwen," Lord Wilfrid interrupted, neatly cutting the ground from under her feet and speaking almost in a whisper in her very ear. "You do understand me, I think? You will come? By the happiest of chances, my noble papa's yacht is even now lying convenient at Bristol, equipped for a cruise and entirely at my disposal. I so long to show you Venice—yes, I think it must be Venice for you. A palazzo overlooking the Grand Canal—"

  "Good heavens!" exclaimed Gwendolen, stopping dead in her surprise, thus causing a stout gentleman in a blue coat with brass buttons walking immediately behind her to tread upon the heel of her sandal. A profusion of exclamations and apologies followed, during which Lord Wilfrid so intimidated the stout gentleman with a bored, bleak stare that he broke off in the middle of his explanations and scurried off like a rabbit.

  "The poor man!" said Gwendolen. "And it was really all my fault, you know, for stopping so abruptly! But I could not help it; you took me so much aback with that absurd speech. I was almost thinking that you meant it!"

  "But I did mean it," said Lord Wilfrid, stung into an unusual show of animation by this crass misunderstanding of his romantic intentions. "My dearest girl, since I first saw you, I have thought of nothing else—"

  “Really? I should think that would have been a dead bore," said Gwendolen amicably. "But I know how it is when one gets an idea into one's head—"

  “What I meant to convey," said Lord Wilfrid, rather between his teeth, for it is difficult to make a declaration of passion in the midst of a crowd to a young lady who persists in misunderstanding you, "is that I adore you, and I want you to go away with me! At once!"

  “What—in the middle of the races, and leave poor Jane to find her way home alone? Really, Lord Wilfrid—!"

  "When I say at once," said Lord Wilfrid, his pale face unwontedly tinged with colour, for he did not like to be thwarted and even less did he like to be laughed at, "I mean tonight— tomorrow—whenever it may be convenient to you. I am entirely at your service—"

  “Well, if you are, you will stop talking nonsense about my going away with you," Gwendolen said decidedly. "Of course I shall do no such thing. Lord Wilfrid. Good gracious, I think you must have had too much champagne! At least that is the only excuse I can think of for your having made such a very foolish suggestion! Oh, there is the Duke!" she went on, as His Grace of Tardiff, supported on either side by Miss Courtney and Lady Maria, made his way slowly from the marquee which, in total disregard for the rights or rules of anyone else, he always had erected for himself conveniently near the finish line. "How do you do, Your Grace? I do hope I find you well."

  The Duke, after looking her over from head to foot and remarking in a lecherous aside to Lord Wilfrid that she was a demmed fetching piece, said he was never well and asked her if her father was satisfied now.

  "Satisfied about what?" Gwendolen enquired, quite at a loss.

  "About getting the better of me over his horses—and his land," said the Duke, almost with a snarl, as Gwendolen later described it to Campaspe. At that moment Campaspe herself came up with Lyndale, and the Duke went on, addressing Lyndale with an exceedingly ungracious air, "I wonder you have the face to show yourself here, sir! Very clever you and Quarters think yourselves, no doubt, to have put the change on me!"

  "Oh, Quarters had nothing to do with it, Duke," Lyndale said, with an agreeable smile. "In point of fact, he told me himself only this morning that he would far rather you had his horses."

  "And his land, I expect!" the Duke said, with heavy scorn. "Trying it on much too rare and thick, Lyndale; I have more sense in my knowledge-box than to swallow that fling! You're going to marry his daughter, ain't you?"

  "Oh, well—that remains to be seen," said Lyndale—enigmatically—upon which Campaspe cast a significant glance at Gwendolen. "But you mustn't believe, at any rate, Duke, that you are the victim of a deep-dyed plot of his," Lyndale continued. "The point is merely that my offer to Smith and Brown was better than yours."

  The Duke grunted, still much dissatisfied, it seemed, and Gwendolen, who had been standing quite lost in astonishment at the revelations contained in this brief exchange, found herself being led to a chair by Lord Wilfrid, who had not the least interest in what happened to Mr. Quarters's land or his horses, and was bent upon demonstrating to her his extreme displeasure over the highly unsatisfactory manner in which she had received his amorous advances.

  But if he had been the Prince Regent himself, Gwendolen would not have noticed the studied hauteur of his manner towards her, so great was her surprise over the information that h
ad just been conveyed to her by the conversation between Lyndale and the Duke. It was Lyndale, then, and not the Duke, who had bought up Brightleaves from Messrs. Smith and Brown!—and why he should have done so, unless, as Campaspe suspected, he was still determined, in spite of everything, to marry Jane, she simply could not conceive. He might well have wanted her father's horses for himself, as Mr. Quarters had accused him of doing, but he could not, she thought, have wished to purchase Brightleaves for any other purpose than to oblige his future father-in-law and prevent the estate from falling into the hands of strangers. But if this were so, why in heaven's name had he not declared his action openly to Mr. Quarters?

  Even the excitement of the races, the cheers of the spectators, and the satisfaction of seeing Conqueror come in a winner (diminished though that satisfaction might be by the fact that his jockey was wearing the silks of the Marquis of Lyndale instead of the Quarters colours) failed to distract her mind from the questions that had been raised in it. She might, of course, ask Lyndale directly what his motives had been, for he sat beside her during the better part of the races, observing with some amusement, it seemed to her, Lord Wilfrid's frosty demeanour and her own rather distrait manner; but somehow she could never seem to think of the right words in which to phrase her questions. And, at any rate, Campaspe, who had suddenly developed a highly confidential air with her escort, was monopolising his attention almost completely. Was it really possible, Gwendolen asked herself in bewilderment, that it was Campaspe, and not Jane, whom Lyndale intended to marry? He was certainly showing no annoyance now over her proprietary airs, but even seemed to be encouraging her.

  She returned to Cheltenham, with Lord Wilfrid and Jane, in a fever of impatience to question her father, and see if he might be able to throw some light at least upon the perplexing matter of Lyndale's purchase of Brightleaves.

  "Papa, did you know that it is Lord Lyndale who has bought up Brightleaves?" she asked him the moment he entered the hall of their small house just before the dinner-hour, after she had lain in wait for him there ever since her own return.

  Mr. Quarters stared at her, his heavy brows beetling over his blue eyes.

  "Lyndale? Pooh-pooh, girl!" he said brusquely, after a moment. "You don't know what you're talking about"—and went to walk past her to the stairs.

  Gwendolen seized his arm. “But, Papa, it's true!" she insisted. "I heard him talking to the Duke this afternoon, and it is he who has bought Brightleaves, not the Duke!"

  A rather singular expression, which appeared to his daughter to be compounded of annoyance, guilt, and a certain quite unaccountable smugness, came over Mr. Quarters's face.

  "Pooh-pooh!" he said again, but even more unconvincingly. "I don't believe a word of it! Why should Lyndale wish to buy Brightleaves? You must be all about in your head, my girl!"

  And he walked on up the stairs, leaving Gwendolen to gaze after him in frustrated indignation.

  "But perhaps," she said to herself, as she followed him slowly up the narrow staircase, "he is so angry with Lyndale already that he can't bear to think of his having Brightleaves, too, and that is why he won't believe it. I don't know what he will do if he hears that Lyndale still wishes to marry Jane—or, worse still, Cammie! Oh dear, I do wish none of us had to marry anyone! It is all such a muddle, for I am quite sure that Cammie doesn't care tuppence for Lyndale, and is still as much in love as ever with Neil, if only the two of them weren't too stiff-necked to admit it!"

  All of which led her to remember that young Lieutenant Fairhall was to escort her to the ball at the Assembly Rooms that evening, where no doubt she would be obliged to meet Lyndale and Lord Wilfrid as well and where the whole perplexing and distracting problem of who was to marry whom, or in Lord Wilfrid's case run off with whom, would no doubt come up again. It was a daunting thought, and only the consideration that she would be wearing a distractingly becoming dress of Lady Priscilla's that evening gave her sufficient courage to face it

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  GWENDOLEN HAD BEEN so much involved with the questions aroused by her afternoon at the races that she had scarcely noticed that Campaspe and Jane had also returned from their excursion to Cleeve Downs in rather peculiar moods. In Jane's case, the peculiarity took the form of retiring to her bedchamber and indulging in a bout of tears, due, Campaspe remarked, to her having seen Alain de Combray at the races; but, as Campaspe also observed, fortunately Jane had the happy ability to cry her eyes out without ruining her face, so it really didn't matter about her being such a ninnyhammer just before a ball.

  As for Campaspe, her peculiarity consisted in the adoption of an air fraught with so much deep mystery and dark importance that it would have aroused curiosity in a statue. Gwendolen had an uneasy notion that it all had something to do with Lyndale, and wondered what new plans her young sister had concocted for setting them all by the ears; but Campaspe, for once, remained mum when she threw out a few inviting leads for an exchange of confidences, and at any rate there was really not much time for that sort of thing in the bustle of preparing for the ball.

  Jane was to wear cornflower-blue, always her best colour, with a draped tunic à la romaine; Gwendolen had been made happy with the presentation to her by Lady Priscilla (who had been obliged to return to Brighton temporarily) of a water-green sarsnet gown with a deep, square-cut neckline and the short, puffed sleeves known as bretelles; while Campaspe gloried in a frock of marigold-yellow, and had crimped her curls in the Caracalla style, faithfully copied from the current number of La Belle Assemblee, which she had carefully studied in Duffield and Weller's Literary Saloon.

  To Campaspe's further triumph, Lyndale had offered to escort her to the ball, and he completed her felicity by presenting to her a posy of yellow-and-white hyacinths, with their stalks tightly encased in silver paper and tied up with long ribbons. Gwendolen, obliged to cope with young Lieutenant Fairhall's unlucky choice of mauve and purple blossoms, was relieved of the necessity of wearing them by the arrival, just before she left for the ball, of a spray of yellow roses in an elegant holder, the accompanying card bearing the cryptic words, Je persevere.

  "Oh, dear! Lord Wilfrid, of course!" she said to Neil. “Do you mind very much if I don't carry either your flowers or his this evening? I'm afraid I was rather rude to him this afternoon—not that he didn't thoroughly deserve it!—and he is certain to feel dreadfully snubbed if he finds I have chosen your posy instead of his."

  Neil, who had arrived just in time to see Campaspe mounting triumphantly into Lyndale's carriage, said rather gloomily that he didn't mind in the least, and proceeded to prove it by bursting into what he apparently believed to be a gay, entertaining monologue upon his lack of good fortune at the races that afternoon, where every horse he had backed seemed to have come in last.

  Unfortunately for the effect he was attempting to create, he frequently lost the thread of his anecdotes completely, stopped dead, and appeared to become absorbed in his own thoughts, from which he would presently wrench himself with a sudden start.

  "Good gracious," said Gwendolen, when this had happened for the third time just as they arrived at the Assembly Rooms, “what is the matter with you this evening, Neil? You act as if you were planning to commit murder and weren't sure you had the plot straight."

  To her surprise, Neil coloured up scarlet and, looking quite as guilty as if she had indeed divined his horrid secret, stammered in an exculpatory voice that he had been thinking.

  "Yes, I know you were," Gwendolen said. "But about what? You haven't been called back to the army, have you? I don't think your leg is nearly well enough yet."

  Neil said no, that wasn't it, and looked at her so imploringly that she immediately, having heard of the ways of young men, surmised that he had either (a) been badly scorched in one of Cheltenham's gaming establishments, or (b) become entangled with one of the many fashionable and charming Birds of Paradise who flocked there during Race-week.

  In either case, she had no wish to embar
rass him by plying him with further questions, so she kindly began to talk about what a crowd there already seemed to be in the Rooms, and said that if he wished to find a place to sit down, he had best look round at once, or he might be obliged to stand all evening.

  "Perhaps you might like to go upstairs to the card room, or the billiard room," she said. "I shall do very well now; there is Jane, with her prosy Mr. Williams—I do think it is odd, since she is so very beautiful, that only the dullest young men seem to wish to gallant her—and I shall join them, or— Oh, here are Cammie and Lord Lyndale," she said, as her young sister, who had apparently entered the room just before them and was preening herself under the attention her arrival with Lyndale had attracted, came rapidly towards them.

  "Oh, Gwen," she at once said, looking straight through Lieutenant Fairhall as if he were a pane of glass, "I have told Lyndale that he must stand up with you for the first set because of the person you came with not being able to. I am going to dance with Mr. Clurton, and then Lyndale can stand up with me for the second set, so that's all right."

  And she flew off across the room, leaving Gwendolen to stare after her with a slight frown upon her face.

  "She is looking very odd," she said to Lyndale rather accusingly, after a moment. "Almost as if she were about to burst with excitement. What in the world have you been saying to her?"

  Lyndale said readily but not quite convincingly that he had said nothing at all.

  "At least nothing to make her burst," he said. "I think you are allowing your imagination to run away with you, Miss Quarters. She seems quite her usual self to me."

  "No, she isn't," Gwendolen insisted. She looked at Neil. “Perhaps it was you that made her look so queer," she said, “because you didn't even say good evening to her"—and then halted suddenly in astonishment, for as she had turned to regard Lieutenant Fairhall, she had surprised him in the very act of directing a look of anxious, conspiratorial interrogation at Lyndale. Whatever it was that had the young lieutenant in such a state of mental ferment that evening, it was now obvious that it had something to do with Lyndale, but she could not conceive in what way the two could have any matter of importance in common. A dozen improbable conjectures chased themselves through her head: among them that Neil had lost money at the gaming-tables to Lyndale—that he was unable to pay; that he and Lyndale were involved in an illegal conspiracy to fix the results of tomorrow's races; and, worst of all, that he had quarrelled with Lyndale over the latter's attentions to Campaspe and had engaged himself to fight a duel with him in the morning.