Читать книгу My Pretty Maid; or, Liane Lester - Alex. McVeigh Miller - Страница 5

Haughty Roma Clarke did not give another thought to the poor sewing girl who had pleased her fastidious taste so entirely in the alteration of her cape.

She threw the dainty wrap over her graceful shoulders, for the September evenings already grew chill, and wandered out into the grounds to watch for Jesse Devereaux, whom she expected to call.

Her restless, impatient nature would not permit her to wait patiently in the drawing room to receive him. She thought it would be so gloriously romantic to stroll about the grounds, clinging to his arm, the splendid moonlight etherealizing her beauty, the murmur of the sea in their ears, the fragrance of flowers all around them. She would not be bothered here with papa or mamma coming into the room to talk to Jesse, and breaking up their delightful tête-à-tête.

She went into a rose arbor near the gate, thinking that she would go out to meet him as soon as she heard the click of the latch.

She had been there but a few moments when Liane passed by with the maid, but she kept very still, though she thought:

"That girl is actually beautiful, and would look superb in good clothes instead of that simple, dark-blue print gown. How foolish it seems for poor girls to be pretty, when they can have nothing nice to set off their beauty. I suppose they must always be pining for riches. How that poor serving girl must have envied me while sewing on this cape! Well, I suppose Miss Bray will give her perhaps twenty-five cents for the extra work, and that will buy her a new ribbon. She ought to be glad that I made her alter it, giving her a little extra pay from her employer. Of course, she could not expect me to pay her myself. My allowance from papa is much too small to permit me the luxury of charity!"

She heard Sophie's light tread, as she returned to the house and muttered:

"I hate that maid. I know she tells tales of me to mamma, and that mamma believes everything, instead of scolding her for tattling! Never mind, Miss Sophie; see if I don't pay you off some time for your meddling! And as for giving you those old gowns you've been hinting for so long, I'd stick them into the fire first!"

She gathered a rose, pulled it to pieces viciously, as if it had been the pert maid she was demolishing, then sighed impatiently:

"Heigh-ho, how slow he is coming!"

The gate latch clicked, and she sprang up with a start, her eyes flashing, her heart throbbing with joy.

She looked out, and saw the figure of a man coming along the graveled walk.

As he came opposite she started forward, crying sweetly:

"Oh, Jesse, dear, is that you?"

The man stopped and faced her. It was her father, and he laughed merrily:

"Not Jesse, dear; but papa, dear!"

Roma recoiled in bitter disappointment, and said petulantly:

"Jesse promised to come. Have you seen him?"

"No, I only walked outside the gates a little way. I saw no one except a very lovely young girl coming from here. Do you know anything about her, Roma?"

"If she was dressed like a kitchen maid in a print gown, she was a girl from the dressmaker's who brought home some work," Roma answered carelessly.

"I did not notice her dress in the moonlight. I could not keep my eyes from her face, she was so very beautiful," Mr. Clarke replied, somewhat dreamily.

Roma shrugged her shoulders scornfully:

"A poor girl has no business to be pretty," she exclaimed.

Mr. Clarke frowned at the sentiment.

"Roma, I do not like to hear you express yourself so heartlessly. You would like to be pretty even if you were poor."

"I cannot even imagine myself poor like the common herd!" she retorted, tossing her beautiful head with queenly pride.

If she had been looking at the man before her, she must have seen that a strange look came upon his face as his secret thoughts ran sarcastically:

"Ignorance indeed is bliss, in this case."

But he knew he could never tell her the truth, much as he sometimes longed to do it, in a sudden anger at her ignoble nature. He could not love the girl who had been taken from a foundling asylum, and placed in the stead of his own lost darling. Ah, no, it was impossible! It seemed to him that there was nothing lovable about Roma, although his wife clung to her with devotion.

He looked at her as she faced him in the moonlight, so proud and confident of her position; her jewels gleaming, her silks rustling as she moved, and thought that, but for the chance that had brought her into his home, she, too, might now be dressed like a servant as she had so contemptuously said of poor Liane Lester.

He felt as if he should like to cast it into her face, the willful, insolent beauty, but he clinched his teeth over the bitter words.

"Heaven help me to bear my cross for Elinor's sake!" he thought.

Roma suddenly came closer to him, and placed her hand on his arm, saying coaxingly:

"Please don't be angry, papa, dear! I didn't mean to seem heartless!"

"I'm glad of that, Roma, for your heart should be full of sympathy, instead of contempt, for that poor, pretty, little sewing girl."

"Yes, papa," gently answered Roma, for she intended to ask him for some new jewels to-morrow, and did not wish to vex him.

"Tell me," he continued eagerly, "all that you know about this pretty Miss Lester."

"I know nothing, papa. I never saw her before this evening, when she brought home my work, and said she was one of Miss Bray's sewing girls. Why, what an interest you take in her, papa! Did you stop and speak to the poor girl?"

"She was running to get home in a hurry, and tripped and fell down; I assisted her to rise. We introduced ourselves, and then she went on; that was all," he explained. "Well, I will leave you to watch for Jesse, while I go and talk to your mamma."

Beautiful Roma looked after Mr. Clarke with angry eyes, muttering:

"The idea of scolding me, his daughter and heiress, about that insignificant little sewing girl! And he thought her very beautiful. I wonder if mamma would be jealous if she heard of his open admiration! I think I will give her a hint, and see!" and she laughed wickedly, while she again turned her eyes toward the gate, watching for her laggard lover.

"Why doesn't he come?" she murmured impatiently, for Roma was so spoiled by overindulgence of a willful nature that she could not bear to wait for anything. She was imperious as a queen.

As the minutes slipped past without bringing the lover, for whom she waited so eagerly, her angry temper began to flame in her great, red-brown eyes like sparks of fire, and she paced back and forth between the arbor and the gate like a caged lioness, her bosom heaving with emotion.

Jesse Devereaux, who had known her only as a bright, vivacious girl, would not have known his sweetheart now, in her fury of rage at his nonappearance.

Angry tears sparkled in her eyes, as she cried:

"If he could not keep his word, he should have sent an excuse. He must know I shall be bitterly disappointed!"

All the beauty of the night mattered nothing to her now. The moonlight, the flowers, the murmur of the sea, were maddening to the girl waiting there alone for her recreant lover. Love and hate struggled for mastery in her capricious breast.

Jesse Devereaux had been hard to win, but she prized him all the more for that, and she could not bear the least apparent slight from him.

"He did not care to come; he has let some trivial excuse keep him away! I will have to teach him that he cannot trifle with my love!" she vowed darkly, flying into the house in a passion.

Seating herself angrily at her desk, she wrote:

Mr. Devereaux: Your failure to keep your engagement with me this evening, without any apparent excuse, seems to me a sufficient excuse for breaking our engagement.

Roma.

She tore a sparkling diamond from her finger, wrapped it in a bit of tissue paper, and inclosed it in the letter, hurrying downstairs again and sending it off to Stonecliff by a messenger, with special directions to deliver it personally to Jesse Devereaux at his hotel.

Her feelings somewhat relieved by this explosion of resentment, Roma laughed harshly, murmuring to herself:

"He will be here the first thing in the morning to beg me to take him back, promising never to slight me so cruelly again. Of course, I will forgive him, after pouting a while, and making him very uneasy, but from this day forward he will have learned a lesson that I must be first with him in everything. I will never tolerate neglect, and he must learn that fact at once."

She was so agitated she could not go into the house just yet. She wandered about the grounds, trying to overcome her angry excitement before she went in, for she knew that her mother was sure to come to her room for a little chat before retiring, and she could not bear her questioning.

"Dear mamma, I know she idolizes me, but at times I find her very tiresome," she soliloquized. "How tired I get of her lecturing on the beauty of goodness, as if I were the wickedest girl in the world! I know I am not goody-goody, as she is, and I don't want to be! Good people don't have much fun in this world; they let the wicked ones get the advantage and run over them always. However, I shall be as sweet as sugar to her to-night, for I want her to help me tease papa to-morrow for that set of rubies I want!"

She leaned upon the gate, letting the cool wind caress her heated brow, waiting for her cheeks to cool, and her heart to thump less fiercely with anger before she went in to encounter her mother's searching gaze; but it would have been a thousand times better for her if she had gone to sob her grief out on that mother's gentle breast, than waited here for the fate that was swiftly approaching.

The dark, sinister-looking stranger who had insulted Liane Lester on the beach had rowed back to shore as soon as Devereaux was out of sight.

He was interested in Roma Clarke, as his questions to Liane had plainly shown.

He came slowly, cautiously, up to the gate, his heart leaping with hope as he saw a beautiful head leaning over it that he hoped and believed must be Roma's herself.

"What luck for me, and what a shock for her!" he muttered grimly, as he advanced.

At the same moment Mrs. Clarke was sending Roma's maid out with a message that it was so chilly she ought to come in, or she might take cold.

She would not listen to her husband's remonstrance that Roma was with her lover, and might not wish to be interrupted.

"Jesse can come in, too; I am sure he would not wish Roma to get sick out in the night air with nothing on her head!" cried the anxious mother.

"How you love that girl!" he cried testily, and she laughed sweetly.

"Are you getting jealous of my love for our daughter, dear? You need not, for the first place in my heart is yours, but remember how devoted I have always been to Roma, ever since she was born."

"I know, but has she ever seemed to show the right appreciation of your devotion?" he exclaimed abruptly.

A deep and bitter sigh quivered over the wife's lips, but she parried the question with a complaint:

"You are always insinuating some fault against my darling. Your heart is cold to her, Edmund."

He put his arms around her, and kissed the still lovely face with the passion of a lover.

"At least it is not cold to you, my darling!" he cried; and pleased at his love-making, she momentarily forgot Roma, and nestled confidingly against his breast.

He was glad that she could not know his secret thoughts, for they ran stubbornly:

"She is right. My heart is indeed cold to Roma. I shall be glad when Devereaux marries her and takes her away, and I do not believe it will break my wife's heart, either; for she seemed to bear it well enough when her daughter was away at boarding school those three years."

Meanwhile Sophie went away most reluctantly with her message, thinking:

"I am sure Miss Roma will not thank me for breaking up her tête-à-tête with her lover, for, of course, she is staying out just to keep him all to herself. But I cannot disobey Mrs. Clarke's commands, though I'll saunter along as slowly as I can, so as to give Miss Roma a little more time."

Sophie was an intelligent and good-hearted girl, and might have been invaluable to Roma, if she could have appreciated such a treasure; but by her selfishness and arrogance she had completely antagonized the young woman, who only stayed, as she had frankly told Liane, for Mrs. Clarke's sake.

As she strolled along, picking a flower here and there, and giving Roma all the time she could, she thought of Liane with pity and admiration.

"There's a lovely girl for you! If she had been rich instead of Miss Roma, I fancy she'd make a better mistress," she murmured, and then the sound of subdued voices came to her ears.

"There she is at the gate with Mr. Devereaux, sure!" she thought, as she saw two heads together, the man's outside, while the murmur of excited voices came to her ears.

"I hope they aren't quarreling already! She had trouble enough hooking him, to be sure!" she thought as she went forward noiselessly, perhaps hoping to catch a word.

She was rewarded by hearing Roma say:

"I will come outside and talk with you. We must not run the risk of being overheard by any one from the house."

The gate latch clicked as she stepped outside and joined her companion, a tall, dark man, whom Sophie did not doubt must be Jesse Devereaux.

She led her companion out toward the high cliff, washed at its base by the surging sea, and Sophie stole after them, thinking curiously:

"Now, what secret have they got, these two, that no one from the house must overhear, I wonder? It is very strange, indeed, and I'll bet they have a mind to elope, just to make a sensation! These rich folks will do any foolish thing to get their names and pictures in the papers! They think it's fame, but any jailbird can get published in the papers. Well, I'll follow you, my lady, and there's one from the house who will hear your secret in spite of your precautions."

She crept along after them, so near that if they had turned their heads they must have seen the skulking figure; but neither Roma nor the man looked back, but kept along the edge of the cliff on the narrow path, talking angrily, it seemed to Sophie, though their words were drowned by the roar of the sea, to the great chagrin of the curious maid.

"But they are certainly quarreling! Ah, now they are stopping! I don't want to interrupt them yet; so I'll hide!" she thought, darting behind a convenient ledge.

In the clear and brilliant moonlight the two figures faced each other, perilously near to the edge of the cliff, and Sophie, peering at them from her concealment, suddenly saw a terrible thing happen.

The man had his back to the sea, facing Roma, and both were talking vehemently, it seemed, from their gestures; when all at once the girl thrust out her foot and struck her companion's knee, causing him to lose his balance. The result was inevitable.

The tall figure lurched backward, swayed an instant, trying to recover itself, toppled over with a shriek of rage, and went over the cliff a hundred feet down into the foaming waters.