Читать книгу Countess Vera; or, The Oath of Vengeance - Alex. McVeigh Miller - Страница 11

The day after Lady Ford's ball dawns cheerlessly. It is cool, and the air is full of floating mists. The gentlemen determine to go out anyhow. The ladies elect to remain at home. The glowing fire in the library has more charms than the bleak, spring air.

"I am not surprised at Nella," says Captain Lockhart, leisurely buttoning his overcoat. "She was raised in America, and our ladies do not walk much. But I have been told that English ladies walk every morning, whether rain or shine. Are you false to the tradition, Lady Vera?"

The color flies into her cheek at his quizzical glance, but she will not tell him what she sees he does not know—that she has been raised in America, too.

"I suppose so," she says, a little shortly, in answer to his question.

"Suppose you come with us for a turn around the square, my dear?" suggests the earl.

"So I will," answers Lady Vera, determined to have Captain Lockhart see that she is quite English in her habits.

She comes down in a moment covered almost to the pink tips of her ears in rich velvet. To her dismay Earl Fairvale strolls forward in a fit of absent-mindedness with Sir Harry, leaving her to be accompanied by the American soldier. She sees no other course but to accept the situation.

"It is only for a few minutes at the worst," she thinks to herself.

So she walks on by his side, looking so pretty with the nipping wind kissing her cheeks into a scarlet glow, that Captain Lockhart can scarcely keep the admiration out of his eyes.

"The loveliest girl I have ever seen in my life," he mentally decides. "But, by Jove! as cold and proud as an iceberg!"

"So you do not like Americans?" he says to her, regretfully, as they turn a corner.

"No," curtly.

"Ah, but, Lady Vera, is that fair?" plaintively. "You do not know us, yet you condemn us without a hearing. Mere English prejudice—is it not?"

She looks around at the handsome face, full of fire and life, and the sparkling blue eyes. The thoughtful gravity on the lovely face grows deeper. The dark eyes flash.

"Captain Lockhart, you are talking of what you do not understand," she says, impatiently.

"I beg your pardon, Lady Vera," he answers, flushing, "I spoke from the merest impulse. I thought—since you are so very young—you could not know my country well."

Lady Vera blushes, but holds her peace. Of course, somebody will tell him her story soon—tell him that her mother was American, and that she herself had spent seventeen years in his own native land. At least he shall not hear it from her. She has a vague notion that it would please him to know it, that the blue eyes whose sparkle she has already learned to know, would light with pleasure at the knowledge.

Those eyes, how bright and keen they are. They seem to read one's thoughts. Lady Vera finds her gaze drooping from them as they never drooped before mortal man's before. Why? she asks herself.

"It is because he is so bold," she decides, vexedly. "He seems to be trying to read one's inmost thoughts. I will show him that I am not afraid of him."

Thereupon she lifts the dark eyes bravely to give him a cool society stare, but in an instant they waver and fall before the glance they have surprised in his. Just so the blue eyes had turned on her last night, when he sang:

"Why do you stare at me so?" she breaks out, angry with herself, and with him.

He flushes, startled by her brusquerie.

"I beg your pardon—I did not mean to be rude," he answers, quietly. "But, Lady Vera, a man must be blind not to look at you."

"Why?" she asks, still sharply.

"Because I think God made all beautiful things for the pleasure of men's eyes," he answers, firmly, yet respectfully.

"Impertinent!" Vera says to herself, indignantly, and looks another way.

"Do you lay an embargo on my eye-sight as far as you are concerned, Lady Vera?" he continues, after a moment.

"Yes," she replies, with her head still turned away.

"Then I shall try to obey you," he answers, calmly. "I will not even see you when I can help it, but you must forgive me for saying that if I should never see you again I shall never forget a single line of your face."

"I hope he is not making love to me," Lady Vera says to herself, uneasily, then laughing at herself. "Of course not; I dare say he has a sweetheart in his own land, some dear, sweet, angelic creature, like Ivy Cleveland, perhaps."

They speak no more, and when they have gone once around the square, Captain Lockhart leaves the earl's daughter at the door with a low bow. She goes into the house, her cheeks tingling with an odd kind of shame.

"I was rude, perhaps," she thinks, a little uneasily. "What must he think of English manners? But then why did he look at me so? I felt so—so strangely."

To Lady Clive, who is trifling over a bit of fancy work, she says, presently:

"Why did you not tell me you expected your brother?"

Lady Clive glances up under her long lashes at the flushed face, a gleam of mischief in the blue eyes so much like her brother's.

"It was just like me—to forget it," she exclaims. "But then I knew you would not be interested. And, besides, I knew he would not be in your way. Phil is only a plain, blunt soldier—not at all a ladies' man."

"I thought he seemed like that last night," Lady Vera answers, turning the leaves of a book very fast, and not knowing how ambiguous is her answer.

"Like what?" her friend inquires.

"A ladies' man," Vera answers.

"Did you? Oh, yes, when he is thrown among them he tries to make himself agreeable, but he does not fall in love, he does not run after them. When he was with us last season, Lady Eva Clarendon made a dead set at him. Phil was very civil at first—sang with her, danced with her, played the agreeable in his careless way, you know. But when he found she was losing her heart to him, he drew off, terrified—seemed to think she would marry him, willy-nilly—and went away to Italy, then back home."

"I should have thought it would have been a grand match for him," Lady Vera answers, with unconscious emphasis of the pronoun.

Lady Clive's head goes up, slightly.

"For my brother? Not at all, Lady Vera," she answers, with a slight touch of stiffness in her voice. "Philip met the Clarendons on equal ground. He is wealthy—that is the first and greatest thing with people, you know—our great-uncle left him a fortune. Next, he is well-born, and the general, our father, is famous over two continents. As for Lady Eva's title, that would not weigh a feather with my brother. He comes from a land, you know, where native worth and nobility take precedence over all."

And having thus blandly squelched Lady Vera's arrogance, the American lady bends smilingly to her lace work again. Lady Vera only smiles. She cannot feel offended.

"I deserved it all," she thinks, soberly to herself. "Oh! why do I suffer my hatred of the Clevelands and Leslie Noble to make me venomous and unjust to every American I meet? I have offended this kind friend of mine, and been rude to her brother all through my spite against those wicked people. I wish he would forgive those ridiculous words I said to him. Not look at me, indeed. How silly! He will think me wondrous vain."

But Captain Lockhart does not forget. When they meet at dinner again Vera glances at him shyly several times across the silver and crystal and flowers, but the blue eyes are always on his plate, or on someone else's face—never on hers. What though she is lovely as a dream in pale-blue satin and gleaming pearls? Captain Lockhart is serenely unconscious of the color of her robe, or the half-repentance in her starry eyes.

"I cannot blame him," she admits to herself, "I acted like a silly child."

The days go by, Captain Lockhart and the earl's daughter are merely civil—they seldom seem to see each other. Each absorbed in the engagements of the gay season, each drifting further apart in the whirl, there is no time for pardon or reconciliation. Lady Vera finds no time for the nursery now save when the soldier is out. Yet she is ever listening for one step, and the color flies into her cheek when she hears it.

Lady Clive is perplexed and sorry because her brother and her favorite do not take to each other.

"I thought they seemed made for each other," she complains, to Sir Harry. "And I thought I had managed them so cleverly. But they scarcely seem conscious of each other's existence."

"I hope you are not turning match-maker, Nella," Sir Harry Clive replies, laughing.

Earl Fairvale sees nothing. Day by day he grows more gloomy, more self-absorbed, and goes less into society. The only interest in his life outside of his adored daughter, centers in the occasional letters that reach him from America. But after each one he grows more sad and gloomy, losing flesh and color daily. Only Vera knows that the vengeance that is the object of his life is so long delayed that the strain on his mind is killing him. For though the most skilled detectives in the world are watching and working, they can find no trace of the secure hiding-place where Marcia Cleveland dwells untroubled by the vengeance from which she has fled.

Lady Vera's roses pale when she sees how her father is breaking down—how the mind is wearing out the body, even as the sword wears out the scabbard.

"Father, even if you found out her hiding-place, what could you do? What form could your revenge take?" she asks him, mournfully, as she has done many times before.

"I cannot tell—but some way would be opened. I should find some vulnerable point at which to strike," he answers, moodily.

She twines her fair, white arms about his neck, and presses her fresh young lips to his clouded brow.

"Father, this long brooding over your revenge, this hatred, nourished in your heart, is sapping your life," she sighs. "I beg you, for my sake, to give it up, dear father. Give it up, and leave it to Heaven!"

He looks at the beautiful, tearful eyes and the sweet face, pale now with its sorrow.

"Vera, you come to me with your mother's face, your mother's voice, and ask me not to avenge her ruined life, her broken heart, her mournful death," he answers, bitterly. "Child, you know not what you ask. What can you know of the pangs I have endured? Have you forgotten, too, the indignities heaped upon you in your young, defenseless life?"

The dark eyes filled with smouldering wrath.

"No, father, never!" she cries; "but it is all past. Mother is safe in Heaven, you and I are together. Let us forget those wicked ones. Surely God will punish them for the ruin they have wrought."

"I will not listen to you, Vera," he says, putting her from him, resolutely. "I have sworn to break Marcia Cleveland's heart if it be not made of stone. If I fail—listen to me, darling—if I fail, I shall bequeath my revenge and my oath to you in dying."

She pales and shivers through all her slight young frame, as if some dim foreboding came to her of the nearing future—that future in whose black shadow her feet already tread, it comes so near.

"I shall bequeath it to you," Earl Fairvale repeats, gloomily; "you will lack no means to accomplish it if only you can find out the serpent's lair. You will be Countess of Fairvale. You will inherit great wealth, and an enormous rent-roll. With wealth you can do almost anything. If I fail you will take up the work where it dropped from my hand in dying—you, Vera, will avenge the dead."