Charles Garvice - Wild Margaret

"His heart! About what?" she demanded, taking up her tea cup.

"About a girl he met there," he said, quietly and coldly.

The fragile and priceless piece of porcelain fell crushed by her fingers.

He rose courteously and picked up the fragments.

"It will spoil the set," he remarked, coolly.

"Girl – girl! What girl?" she demanded.

She was white to the lips, and her gray eyes seemed to have grown dark, almost black.

"A girl whom he found staying in the house," he rejoined, with a cool ease that maddened her. "I can describe her, for Blair was minute to weariness. She is tall, graceful, has auburn hair, large and expressive eyes, a small mouth, a clear, musical voice, an angelic smile – "

She put up her hand.

"Are – are you saying all this to – to play with me?" she said, and her voice was almost hoarse.

He raised his brows and looked above her head with an air of surprise.

"No. They are his own words," he said.

"And – and you think he is in" – she paused; something seemed to stop her utterance for a moment – "he is in love with this girl?"

He sat silent for a moment.

"If he is to be believed, he is most certainly," he responded, coldly; "very much in love – head over heels! He raved about her for nearly an hour by the clock; I timed him."

She sprung to her feet and moved to and fro, her tiny hand clutching the riding-whip until the nails ran into her soft, pink palm. Then she stopped suddenly and looked at him.

"And this – this girl?" she said. "Who is she?"

"The daughter – no, to be exact, the granddaughter of the earl's housekeeper," he said slowly, as if he enjoyed it.

She panted and drew her breath heavily.

"A servant!" she exclaimed, and she laughed, a cruel unwomanly laugh.

"By no means," he said. "She is, according to Blair, and he is a fair judge, a lady. She is an artist, and is copying the pictures in the Court gallery."

Her face grew white and anxious again.

"What – what is her name?" she demanded, and her voice was hard and hoarse.

He took an ivory tablet from his pocket and consulted it.

"Her name is Margaret – a pretty name; reminds one of Faust, doesn't it? Margaret Hale."

"Margaret Hale," she repeated slowly; then she came and stood in front of him, her gray eyes as hard as steel, her lips drawn across her white, even teeth. "And he – you say – he is in love with her?"

He shrugged his shoulders.

"He says so," he said coldly.

"And – and he speaks of marrying her?"

"Apparently it is the one and absorbing desire of his life," he responded in exactly the same manner.

She opened her lips as if about to speak again, then sank on to a couch in silence.

He rose.

"I'll go," he said.

"Wait!" she said, and she stretched out her hand with the whip in it. "Austin, this – this, must be stopped, prevented – " she spoke with a panting breathlessness. "You – you understand. It must be prevented, at all costs, at any risks! You will do it! Promise me! Remember our bargain! Ask what you please, I will grant it. Half – every penny I possess – anything! You will prevent it!"

He stood looking at her without an atom of expression on his clean-cut face, which might have been a marble mask.

"I understand," he said, after the pause. "At any cost? You will not upbraid, reproach me in the future, whatever may happen?"

"No. I shall not! At any cost!" she repeated, meeting his cold glance.

He stood regarding the wall above her head for a moment, then, without a word, went out and left her.

Slowly, impassively, he paced down the stairs, his eyes fixed on the open doorway and the street beyond, but reaching the hall, which happened to be empty, he paused, and with his foot on the doorstep, he turned round and smiled.

It was a peculiar smile and difficult to analyze, but supposing a man had caught a wild animal in a trap and had left it hard and fast, to be killed at his leisure, that man might smile as Austin Ambrose smiled as he looked round the hall of Violet Graham's house in Park Lane.

Margaret had never been in love. If any one had asked her why not, she would have said that she was too busy, and hadn't time. Young men had admired her, and some few, the artists whom she met now and again, had fallen in love with her, but no one had ever spoken of the great mystery to her, for there was something about Margaret, with all her wildness, an indescribable maiden dignity which kept men silent.

Lord Blair had been the first to speak to her in tones hinting at passion, and it is little wonder that his words clung to her, and utterly refused to be dismissed from her mind, though she tried hard and honestly to forget them; even endeavored to laugh at them, as the wild words of a wild young man, who would probably forget that he had ever spoken them, and forget her, too, an hour or two after he had got to London.

But she could not. She said not a word of what had occurred to old Mrs. Hale, for she felt that she could not have borne the flow of talk, and comment, and rebuke which the old lady would pour out. It would have been better if she had spoken and told her all; a thing divided becomes halved, a thing dwelt upon grows and gets magnified.

Margaret brooded over the wild words Lord Blair had said until every sentence was engraved on her mind; even the expression of his face as he stood before her, defiant as a Greek god, got impressed upon her memory so that she could call it up whenever she pleased, and, indeed, it rose before her when she did not even wish it.

"This is absurd and – and nonsensical!" she exclaimed on the second day after his departure, when she suddenly awoke to the fact that she had been sitting, brush in hand, staring before her and recalling Lord Blair's handsome, dare-devil eyes, as they had looked into hers. "I am behaving like a foolish, sentimental idiot!" she told herself, dabbing some color on her canvas with angry self-reproach. "What on earth can it matter to me what such a person as Viscount Leyton said to me? I shall never see him again, and he has probably forgotten, by this time, that such a person as myself exists! I am an idiot not to be able to forget him as easily. He behaved like a savage to the very last, and I would not speak to him again if – if we were cast alone on a desert island!"

She sprung to her feet with an exclamation of annoyance, and began bundling her painting materials together, and was in the midst of clearing up, when she heard a step behind her, and saw the earl.

It was near the dinner hour, and he was in evening dress, for, though he dined alone, he always assumed the regulation attire; and Margaret, as she looked at him, could not help noticing the vague likeness between him and Lord Blair.

"Do I disturb you?" he said, in his low, grave voice, and he paused with the knightly courtesy for which he was famous.

"No, my lord. I have just finished for to-day," said Margaret, rather shyly, for she felt his greatness, which spoke in the tone of his voice, and proclaimed itself even in his gait, and the way he held himself.

With a slight inclination of his head he came and stood before the canvas.

A slight expression of surprise came over his face.

"You have made an excellent copy," he said. "I think you are capable of higher work – original work."

Margaret's face flushed with pleasure, but she said nothing. It was not for so humble an individual as herself to bandy compliments with so great a personage as the Earl of Ferrers.

"You have worked hard," he said, looking at her; "not too hard, I hope."

Now Margaret had grown rather pale during these last two days. It had been one of the results of Lord Blair's passionate words. She did not sleep much at night, and what with this and dwelling upon the scene that had passed between them, the roses which Mrs. Hale wished to see had vanished from her face.