The Tigress Part 29

Carleigh didn't care in the least. In spite of her struggling he held her fast, and his voice rang almost fiercely as he said:

"Don't tell this yet. You see we are going to be married."

"Yes?" observed the viscount, without a trace of wonder or any other emotion. "I wish you joy."

With that she wrenched herself free. "No, no!" she cried in a pa.s.sion of protest. "It isn't so! It's not true! I have refused him. You know my story, Hal! You know how it is with me!

"I can never marry any man but one. I told him so, but he wouldn't believe it. And then he cried and I kissed him. You tell him that I can never marry him. Tell him everything."

Kneedrock's lip curled in a cynical half-smile.

"It's not my story to tell," was his retort. "I don't understand it. I never do understand love-stories. It's quite enough for me to go about alone without any love-story of my own and come suddenly upon broken-hearted people like yourselves."

Carleigh was deepest crimson. "You might spare Mrs. Darling at all events," he said haughtily.

Kneedrock glanced at him indifferently. "I'm not being rough with any one," he returned. "I haven't any faith in human nature, so stiles never give me shocks."

He paused a brief moment and looked over their heads at the gray sky.

Neither of them spoke.

"I say," he added suddenly. "Do you know it's long past three? You'll both be jolly late for tea unless you make haste. I'm off." And he was gone.

"I wonder what will happen next," Nina hazarded as she watched Nibbetts disappear over the crest of the hill. Then she turned to Carleigh with a most enticing smile.

"Well, as we know one another pretty well now, perhaps you had better take me in your arms and kiss me very nicely once more, for it is quite possible we may never have another chance."

Carleigh could hardly place himself. Whether he was in his right senses or had all at once lost his reason--turned lunatic--he couldn't just tell for the life of him.

Nevertheless, he eagerly obeyed her suggestion. He took her in his arms and he kissed her--not once, but thrice.

Then they walked home.

CHAPTER XIV

Truths, Kisses, and Ducal Ennui

Carleigh, in his room before dinner that evening, took his head in his hands and wondered.

He wondered a long time, but nothing very clear resulted. Then he rebrushed his disordered hair until it was smooth and s.h.i.+ning once more, and went down.

The dinner guests were Mr. Telborn and the Marchioness of Highs.h.i.+re, who happened to be legally man and wife. Both of them were exceedingly lofty personages.

"We wouldn't have come if we had known the Greys were here," the Marchioness said confidentially to Lady Bellingdown, with a slight frown as they sat waiting. "Mr. Telborn never liked him, anyway, and since the affair of--"

The marchioness rested her case there.

"Where's that old Rembrandt copy of yours now?" Telborn asked his host, fixing his gla.s.s in his eye and glaring about the room. "It used to hang over there."

"Oh, that's up in London on exhibition," writhed his lords.h.i.+p. "Some vow it's real, you know."

"Real--huh!" returned Telborn expressively.

"Well now, it may be real, you know," said the duke, coming forward with valor. "And if it isn't, ever so many good pictures are copies. I say, Doody, haven't we a lot of copies at Puddlewood?"

But the d.u.c.h.ess was otherwise interested.

"You've heard about Emily, of course," she was saying, addressing the marchioness. "The poor thing's run off with the second coachman. A very nice-appearing man, I believe. But it seems that he has one wife already."

"How terrible!" exclaimed Mrs. Darling, who was sitting close to the fire, yet s.h.i.+vered slightly.

"People do run off sometimes," reminded Carleigh, who was standing beside her. "I don't know that it's so terrible. It settles things quickly."

"But not when the man's married; only when the woman's married," the d.u.c.h.ess qualified. "When the woman's married it does settle things, of course; but when the man's married, it doesn't.

"I will say this--a husband left in the lurch is always much more obliging at helping to set things straight than is a woman. Think of the Betterton-Nyns! They've been waiting for ten years. So has Captain Leigh."

"I wonder why people who love one another don't bolt oftener," said Carleigh in a low voice to Nina, dragging a chair near as the d.u.c.h.ess turned away and perching himself on its arm. "Conventionality is a very ghastly thing, with which I have less patience every hour."

"If they both want to, they generally do," she replied without smiling.

"But they must _both_ want to."

"Well, then, why don't the Betterton-Byns, or whatever's the name--I never heard of them before--do it, then?"

"Why, they have done it. They've been off for years. In Alaska or somewhere. Betterton-Nyn, not Byn, is the name they took. It's Claudius Synge and Elsie Fairweather, don't you know."

"No, I didn't know," said Carleigh, much shocked. "And who is Captain Leigh?"

"Leigh Fairweather, of course."

"Oh, of course."

After this came the dinner, and then coffee in the rose-pink picture-room, the royal blue picture-room being closed for the week to all but decorators.

Nina had slipped away, and the other women were having a thoroughly enjoyable time talking about her.

"She doesn't really want him, does she?" the marchioness asked Lady Bellingdown. "I thought that there was something very bad about him. If he's so nice, why didn't the mother marry him herself?"

"That's what every one is asking," said the d.u.c.h.ess, noting her hostess's embarra.s.sment. "I'm sure I think he's very nice myself. And so pathetic, too. We're going to ask him to Puddlewood later."

"I don't think that Nina will ever marry again," observed Charlotte Grey.

"And yet, you know, she'd be rather dear to marry," the d.u.c.h.ess commented. "I always liked Nina Darling. Of course, we understand that she shouldn't. Yet she's very nice."

"Poor Colonel Darling!" sighed Lady Bellingdown reflectively.