DEPPINGHAM FALLS ILL
That evening Lord Deppingham took to his bed with violent chills. He shivered and burned by turns and spent a most distressing night. Bobby Browne came in twice to see him before retiring. For some reason unknown to any one but himself, Deppingham refused to be treated by the young man, notwithstanding the fact that Browne laid claim to a physician's certificate and professed to be especially successful in breaking up "the ague." Lady Agnes entreated her liege lord to submit to the doses, but Deppingham was resolute to irascibility.
"A Dover's powder, Deppy, or a few grains of quinine. Please be sensible. You're just like a child."
"What's in a Dover's powder?" demanded the patient, who had never been ill in his life.
"Ipecac and opium, sugar of milk or sulphate of potash. It's an anodyne diaphoretic," said Browne.
"Opium, eh?" came sharply from the couch. "Good Lord, an overdose of it would—" he checked the words abruptly and gave vent to a nervous fit of laughter.
"Don't be a fool, George," commanded his wife. "No one is trying to poison you."
"Who's saying that he's going to poison me?" demanded Deppingham shortly. "I'm objecting because I don't like the idea of taking medicine from a man just out of college. Now judge for yourself, Browne: would you take chances of that sort, away off here where there isn't a physician nearer than twelve hundred miles? Come now, be frank."
Bobby Browne leaned back and laughed heartily. "I daresay you're right. I should be a bit nervous. But if we don't practise on some one, how are we to acquire proficiency? It's for the advancement of science. Lots of people have died in that service."
"By Jove, you're cold-blooded about it!" He stared helplessly at his wife's smiling face. "It's no laughing matter, Agnes. I'm a very sick man."
"Then, why not take the powders?"
"I've just given my wife a powder, old man. She's got a nervous headache," urged Browne tolerantly.
"Your wife?" exclaimed Deppingham, sitting up. "The devil!" He looked hard at Browne for a moment. "Oh, I say, now, old chap, don't you think it's rather too much of a coincidence?"
Browne arose quickly, a flash of resentment in his eyes. "See here, Deppingham—"
"Don't be annoyed, Bobby," pleaded Lady Agnes. "He's nervous. Don't mind him."
"I'm not nervous. It's the beastly chill."
"Just the same. Lady Agnes, I shall not give him a grain of anything if he persists in thinking I'm such a confounded villain as to—"
"I apologise, Browne," said Deppingham hastily. "I'm not afraid of your medicine. I'm only thinking of my wife. If I should happen to die, don't you know, there would be people who might say that you could have cured me. See what I mean?"
"You dear old goose," cried his wife.
"I fancy Selim or Baillo or even Bowles knows what a fellow doses himself with when he's bowled over by one of these beastly island ailments. Oblige me, Agnes, and send for Bowles."
Bowles came bowing and scraping into the room a few minutes later. He immediately recommended an old-fashioned Dover's powder and ventured the opinion that "good sweat" would soon put his lordship on his feet, "better than ever." Deppingham kept Bowles beside him while Browne generously prepared and administered the medicine.
Later in the night the Princess came to see how the patient was getting on. He was in a dripping perspiration.
Genevra drew a chair up beside his couch and sat down.
Lady Agnes was yawning sleepily over a book.
"Do you know, I believe I'd feel better if I could have another chill," he said. "I'm so beastly hot now that I can't stand it. Aggie, why don't you turn out on the balcony for a bit of fresh air? I'm a brute to have kept you moping in here all evening."
Lady Agnes sighed prettily and—stepped out into the murky night. There were signs of an approaching storm in the sultry air.
"I say, Genevra, what's the news?" demanded his lordship.
"The latest bulletin says that you are very much improved and that you expect to pass a comfortable night."
"'Gad I do feel better. I'm not so stuffy. Where is Chase?"
Now, the Princess, it is most distressing to state, had wilfully avoided Mr. Chase since early that morning.
"I'm sure I don't know. I had dinner with Mrs. Browne in her room. I fancy he's off attending to the guard. I haven't seen him."
"Nice chap," remarked Deppingham. "Isn't that he now, speaking to Agnes out there?"
Genevra looked up quickly. A man's voice came in to them from the balcony, following Lady Deppingham's soft laugh.
"No," she said, settling back calmly. "It's Mr. Browne."
"Oh," said Deppingham, a slight shadow coming into his eyes. "Nice chap, too," he added a moment later.
"I don't like him," said she, lowering her voice. Deppingham was silent. Neither spoke for a long time The low voices came to them indistinctly from the outside.
"I've no doubt Agnes is as much to blame as he," said his lordship at last. "She's made a fool of more than one man, my dear. She rather likes it."
"He's behaving like a brute. They've been married less than a year."
"I daresay I'd better call Aggie off," he mused.
"It's too late."
"Too late? The deuce—"
"I mean, too late to help Drusilla Browne. She's had an ideal shattered."
"It really doesn't amount to anything, Genevra," he argued. "It will blow over in a fortnight. Aggie's always doing this sort of thing, you know."
"I know, Deppy," she said sharply. "But this man is different. He's not a gentleman. Mr. Skaggs wasn't a gentleman. Blood tells. He will boast of this flirtation until the end of his days."
"Aggie's had dozens of men in love with her—really in love," he protested feebly. "She's not—"
"They've come and gone and she's still the same old Agnes and you're the same old Deppy. I'm not thinking of you or Aggie. It's Drusilla Browne."
"I see. Thanks for the confidence you have in Aggie. I daresay I know how Drusilla feels. I've—I've had a bad turn or two, myself, lately, and—but, never mind." He was silent for some time, evidently turning something over in his mind. "By the way, what does Chase say about it?" he asked suddenly.
She started and caught her breath. "Mr. Chase? He—he hasn't said anything about it," she responded lamely. "He's—he's not that sort,"
"Ah," reflected Deppingham, "he is a gentleman?"
Genevra flushed. "Yes, I'm sure he is."
"I say, Genevra," he said, looking straight into her rebellious eyes, "you're in love with Chase. Why don't you marry him?"
"You—you are really delirious, Deppy," she cried. "The fever has----"
"He's good enough for any one—even you," went on his lordship coolly.
"He may have a wife," said she, collecting her wits with rare swiftness. "Who knows? Don't be silly, Deppy."
"Rubbish! Haven't you stuffed Aggie and me full of the things you found out concerning him before he left Thorberg—and afterward? The letters from the Ambassador's wife and the glowing things your St. Petersburg friends have to say of him, eh? He comes to us well recommended by no other than the Princess Genevra, a most discriminating person. Besides, he'd give his head to marry you—having already lost it."
"You are very amusing, Deppy, when you try to be clever. Is there a clause in that silly old will compelling me to marry any one?"
"Of course not, my dear Princess; but I fancy you've got a will of your own. Where there's a will, there's a way. You'd marry him to-morrow if—if----"
"If I were not amply prepared to contest my own will?" she supplied airily.
"No. If your will was not wrapped in convention three centuries old. You won't marry Chase because you are a princess. That's the long and the short of it. It isn't your fault, either. It's born in you. I daresay it would be a mistake, after a fashion, too. You'd be obliged to give up being a princess, and settle down as a wife. Chase wouldn't let you forget that you were a wife. It would be hanging over you all the time. Besides, he'd be a husband. That's something to beware of, too."
"Deppy, you are ranting frightfully," she said consolingly. "You should go to sleep."
"I'm awfully sorry for you, Genevra."
"Sorry for me? Dear me!"
"You're tremendously gone on him."
"Nonsense! Why, I couldn't marry Mr. Chase," she exclaimed, irritable at last. "Don't put such things into my head—I mean, don't get such things into that ridiculous old head of yours. Are you forgetting that I am to become Karl's wife in June? You are babbling, Deppy----"
"Well, let's say no more about it," he said, lying back resignedly. "It's too bad, that's all. Chase is a man. Karl isn't. You loathe him. I don't wonder that you turn pale and look frightened. Take my advice! Take Chase!"
"Don't!" she cried, a break in her voice. She arose and went swiftly toward the window. Then she stopped and turned upon him, her lips parted as if to give utterance to the thing that was stirring her heart so violently. The words would not come. She smiled plaintively and said instead: "Good-night! Get a good sleep."
"The same to you," he called feverishly.
"Deppy," she said firmly, a red spot in each cheek, her voice tense and strained to a high pitch of suppressed decision, "I shall marry Karl Brabetz. That will be the end of your Mr. Chase."
"I hope so," he said. "But I'm not so sure of it, if you continue to love him as you do now."
She went out with her cheeks burning and a frightened air in her heart. What right, what reason had he to say such things to her? Her thoughts raced back to Neenah's airy prophecy.
Bobby Browne and Agnes were approaching from the lower end of the balcony. She drew back into the shadow suddenly, afraid that they might discover in her flushed face the signs of that ugly blow to her pride and her self-respect. "I'm not so sure of it," was whirling in her brain, repeating itself a hundred times over, stabbing her each time in a new and even more tender spot.
"If you continue to love him as you do now," fought its way through the maze of horrid, disturbing thoughts. How could she face the charge: "I'm not so sure of it," unless she killed the indictment "if you love him as you do now?"
Lady Agnes and Browne passed by without seeing her and entered the window. She heard him say something to his companion, softly, tenderly—she knew not what it was. And Lady Agnes laughed—yes, nervously. Ah, but Agnes was playing! She was not in love with this man. It was different. It was not what Neenah meant—nor Deppingham, honest friend that he was.
Down below she heard voices. She wondered—inconsistently alert—whether he was one of the speakers. Thomas Saunders and Miss Pelham were coming in from the terrace. They were in love with each other! They could be in love with each other. There was no law, no convention that said them nay! They could marry—and still love! "If you continue to love him as you do now," battered at the doors of her conscience.
Silently she stole off to her own rooms; stealthily, as if afraid of something she could not see but felt creeping up on her with an evil grin. It was Shame!
Her maid came in and she prepared for bed. Left alone, she perched herself in the window seat to cool her heated face with the breezes that swept on ahead of the storm which was coming up from the sea. Her heart was hot; no breeze could cool it—nothing but the ice of decision could drive out the fever that possessed it. Now she was able to reason calmly with herself and her emotions. She could judge between them. Three sentences she had heard uttered that day crowded upon each other to be uppermost: not the weakest of which was one which had fallen from the lips of Hollingsworth Chase.
"It is impossible—incredible!" she was saying to herself. "I could not love him like that. I should hate him. God above me, am I not different from those women whom I have known and pitied and despised? Am I not different from Guelma von Herrick? Am I not different from Prince Henri's wife? Ah, and they loved, too! And is he not different from those other men—those weak, unmanly men, who came into the lives of those women? Ah, yes, yes! He is different."
She sat and stared out over the black sea, lighted fitfully by the distant lightning. There, she pronounced sentence upon him—and herself. There was no place for him in her world. He should feel her disdain—he should suffer for his presumption. Presumption? In what way had he offended? She put her hands to her eyes but her lips smiled—smiled with the memory of the kiss she had returned!
"What a fool! What a fool I am," she cried aloud, springing up resolutely. "I must forget. I told him I couldn't, but I—I can." Half way across the room she stopped, her hands clenched fiercely. "If—if Karl were only such as he!" she moaned.
She went to her dressing table and resolutely unlocked one of the drawers, as one would open a case in which the most precious of treasures was kept. A cautious, involuntary glance over her shoulder, and then she ran her hand into the bottom of the drawer.
"It was so silly of me," she muttered. "I shall not keep them for him." The drawer was partly filled with cigarettes. She took one from among the rest and placed its tip in her red lips, a reckless light in her eyes. A match was struck and then her hand seemed to be in the clutch of some invisible force. The light flickered and died in her fingers. A blush suffused her face, her eyes, her neck. Then with a guilty, shamed, tender smile she dropped the cigarette into the drawer. She turned the key.
"No," she said to herself, "I told him that I was keeping them for him."
