Faithful Margaret Part 25

She vanished within the gloomy portal, and Dr. Gay carried the message to Colonel Brand, who swore a great oath that the girl had both sense and spirit, and, with her castle to boot, would not make a bad speculation.

So his next visit was paid at the old castle, and Margaret led him through the length and breadth of it, and sought to trap him into blundering over its various rooms and he answered all her questions correctly, and comported himself with perfection as St. Udo Brand, and left her in the evening, still and moody, thinking out her next secret move to snare him.

CHAPTER XIV.

WILL HE BETRAY HIMSELF?

St. Udo Brand was walking with Margaret over the rustling leaves of the Norman oaks, and beguiling the time by recounting his adventures in the American war.

How minutely he described his small part in the great wild drama of carnage! How feelingly he touched on the sorrows of war; how enthusiastically he extolled the valor of his Vermont boys!

The whole tissue of events reproduced with such marvelous accuracy, that Margaret was dumb with secret wonder.

How could one living being rehea.r.s.e so faithfully the part of another?

Events which had been minutely described in his letters to the executors were now detailed with the most copious explanations; while allusions to his former life as a guardsman, and to incidents of his youth, kept her in continual mind of his genuineness.

He was constantly throwing little proofs of his ident.i.ty in her way, and surrounding himself with a halo of reality, and yet--and yet----

Margaret paced over the crisp brown leaves, whirling round her footsteps in the bleak November wind, her eyes ever and anon turning upon her companion in troubled scrutiny, her ear intent to catch each syllable.

"How these old creaking oaks bring back to me my boyhood! What bright dreams of glory filled my brain! What a life mine was to be! I was to go forth and conquer; all men were to bow before St. Udo Brand; beauty was to melt and find its level at my feet. But see me, Miss Walsingham--no longer a dream-dazzled boy. A man at his prime! Where are my brilliant prospects now? My visions of fame--of love--of happiness? Lost in the quicksand of Time. Is there in the whole world a more useless, ruined wretch than myself? I am famous but for my misdeeds. My intellect has been squandered upon worthless objects; love has cheated me; I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage."

Margaret could not respond to this half-earnest, half-bitter appeal.

How often she had imagined just such words in the mouth of St. Udo Brand, with a yearning thrill, as if Heaven itself would have been opened to her.

But now that the time had come she shrank from the man and his loneliness and his half remorse in cold sympathy.

How dare he come to her with his polluted life.

She read the false and s.h.i.+fting eyes with loathsome shudder, and a hardening of the lip, as if a rat had fawned upon her.

"You wretch!" thought the girl, with fiercely-clenched hand.

"How dare you think to step into St. Udo's shoes and expect to cheat me?"

"It is strange that Colonel Brand should be so dissatisfied with his laurels," she said, with cold scorn. "One would have thought that the reputation which he gained for bravery and intrepidity as a commander, would have slaked his thirst for fame. Perhaps _you_ fear that the laurels of a whole army would not cover your deficiencies?"

She placed such unconscious emphasis on the "you," that the colonel turned his face upon her with broad attention.

She saw the startled eye, though it instantly wavered from hers, and she felt the lagging of his feet.

"Is there no possibility of trapping him out of his own mouth?" she thought, "Can I not force him to betray himself?"

Women are apt at resources; they cannot surmount great difficulties--their muscles are so soft, and their brains so repressed by convention and circ.u.mstance, but they can vault the slighter obstacles with lightning quickness, while the man's slower strength is culminating for the heights.

"I know but little of St. Udo Brand," pondered Margaret; "But I will traverse with this man every inch of the ground of which I am mistress, and if he is false, surely he must fall in something. Let me set _the first trap_."

"As we pa.s.s this lodge a certain a.s.sociation comes into my mind," she said, always with that cold scorn breaking through her enforced courtesy; "and now that I am honored by having you to refer to, I shall bring my difficulty for your solution.

"How was my dear Miss Brand choked by a parasite?"

The colonel stared blankly. An uneasy frown stole up to his forehead; once, twice, he opened his lips to speak, but checked himself and waited.

The silence became too threatening on the part of Margaret; she was forced to lead the next step,

"You seem to be utterly confounded, sir, I would not have asked you the question if I had not had your own word that such was the case."

"May I ask, my dear Miss Walsingham, may I ask to what you refer?"

"You feign forgetfulness. Fie, Colonel Brand, is it possible that the few words which have ever pa.s.sed between us could have slipped your memory? Perhaps you will profess yourself unable to explain to me the term 'fortune-hunter,' as applied in connection with me, also."

The blank change deepened on the soldier's sallow countenance, then a certain film covered the wandering eyes, like those of an eagle before the too bright sun.

"Miss Walsingham, whoever informed you of my using any such invidious term in connection with you, traduced me."

"You never used the word then?"

"On my honor as a gentleman, no."

"Ha," cried Margaret, with a flash of triumph, "then you utterly deny having ever written to me?"

A scowl, withering as fire, crossed the colonel's face, and a furtive glare at his daring opponent, made her shudder though she did not see it.

"You refer to the unlucky note I was insane enough to write to you, the night upon which I left Castle Brand?" he inquired, slowly coming out of his fog. "I had forgotten its contents."

"Most extraordinary that you should forget its contents, Colonel Brand.

Then you can explain nothing, and I must expect no apology for the bitterest insult which you could have pa.s.sed upon one in my position."

"Dear Miss Walsingham, I--I meant no insult. Please do not take it as such."

She laughed a taunting, irritating laugh. If he had been a worm wriggling along by her side she could not have treated him with more contempt.

"So brave to bark! so timid to bite!" she jibed. "Oh Colonel Brand, that is so unlike the daring spirit of the Brands, which scorned to cringe, that I am almost tempted to _believe you some impish changeling_."

Some white indentations came upon the livid face of Colonel Brand; for an instant it seemed as if in his murderous wrath he would smite the girl to the earth, but he quailed as soon as her glittering eyes were fixed upon him, and spoke, though with a thick and husky tone.

"Is it generous thus to trample on a fallen man? You can see--all who ever met me before I left England, can see how much I have changed by these cursed months in the deadly swamps, and the pestiferous hospital, not to speak of the wounds which reduced me to a skeleton, and aged me, as five years would have failed to do. All this tells upon a man's spirits, Miss Walsingham; and I am quite ready to confess that I have lost much of my bravado, and my insolent manner of riding on fortune's neck, as if I could ever expect to stay there."

"You speak as bitterly of yourself, as if you were your bitterest enemy!"

The colonel looked up at the dim sky with that hooded stare of his.