'Pull all straight?—I should think we would!' said Ted proudly, possessing himself of Stella's left hand, while her brother held the right.
'How long do you mean to keep up that wicked little story about my throwing you over?' said Cuthbert, smiling fondly at her as he stroked her hair. 'There never lived the human being who could make me do that. And, Stella, whatever comes or goes, if ever you are in trouble or perplexity, never forget that if need were I would lay down my life for you.' He did not mean to say so much, but there was some undercurrent of feeling at work which he could hardly analyze. He only knew that from the first a strong misgiving beset him as to this marriage.
At Courtland's words a vague alarm rose in Laurette's breast. 'How very absurd!' she thought to herself angrily. 'Women don't want their brothers after they are married—not in that way.'
She herself had only wanted her brother's money, and the means by which she had obtained some of it, and hoped for still more, rose before her, for the first time, in an almost lurid light. A sudden panic fastened on her lest there should be some loophole by which her machinations should be detected. But she had gone too thoroughly to work to be caught in the toils which wreck the half-hearted dissembler. It is not cunning, but simplicity, that must patch and tell a tale which often carries no conviction in a world where it is a common trade to make the thing which is seem as though it were not. Simplicity, poor unthrift, who makes no use of all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory thereof, but to tell the truth, is all too often shamed into hiding her pensive, virginal, unaffected brow before the bold, rouged, menacing front of her successful rival—Mendacity.
But Laurette betrayed none of the uneasiness which shot athwart her mind. Indeed, her anxieties at this time were so multiform that they might be said to swallow each other, so that, on the whole, she kept up as gay an appearance as though no cares oppressed her. Chief among them was her husband's intrigue with this 'wretched little divorced actress.' This had blossomed apace into a well-concocted scheme of indefinite migration on his part with her theatrical company. Laurette knew this definitely by means of examining the Honourable Talbot's pocket-book, when he slept not wisely but too well. And yet she felt that her only course was to make no sign; to feign complete ignorance, and take such action at the last moment, that is, the eleventh of October, as might be of vital service to her. Then that letter which she had got Mrs. Anson to write. It was only after fully convincing herself that Langdale's half-erased, mutilated narrative might not of itself serve her purpose, that Laurette had hit on the scheme of boldly supplementing it by a communication which would at once throw light on his supposed story, and his action in hastening away without seeing Stella. She judged unerringly, too, that the thought of his hastening back to a loving wife anxious for reconciliation would stab the girl's pride into more active resistance against grief than any other theory.
'Stella has it in her to be jealous—one can see that by the way she took her brother's engagement,' reasoned Laurette. 'And if there is any occasion on which jealousy may grow into a monster, surely it is when the man who called you "sweet St. Charity," and the innermost leaf of his heart, is supposed to be steaming away at the rate of seventeen knots an hour to the beautiful woman he married before he left school, so to speak. Not that I believe she is really dead—at any rate, if so, her conduct is very unlike that of other people, who could do nothing to oblige one in life so much as to leave it....'
Yes, all her calculations had been singularly favoured by Providence; but this speedy engagement was of that order of good luck which all but frightens one. It was almost sinister—like the appearance of a sociable vulture in the desert when drawing near a well that may prove empty. All that evening at Mrs. Joran's private theatricals the thought rose at intervals, What if Stella and Langdale met abroad? And yet, once the marriage had taken place, what would it avail? There was a dance after the acting was over. Everyone was enraptured with Talbot's masterly performance, and she replied to congratulations on this abominable accomplishment as cheerfully as though it were not drawing a husband and a father, as she styled him, even to herself, in her more melodramatic moments, into the Bohemian depths of a strolling-player's career. But she would save him despite himself—which was usually the way people were saved when once they gave themselves up to the enjoyment of being lost. And to secure that end what means were not legitimate? Yet she could not resist the inclination to reassure herself, by laughing inquiry of a distinguished judge, as to whether deception practised to bring marriage about could in any way invalidate it.
'My dear Mrs. Tareling, what could have put such an uncanny idea into your head? What marriage would be safe if once the plea of deception were allowed to batter against the foundations of the holy institution of matrimony?' said the judge, laughing. 'Take the deceptions which Nature puts upon us, to begin with——'
'Now, Sir Henry, you are laughing at me! No one ever knows where Nature begins or ends. I do not mean only with the complexions of my own dear sex.' The judge laughed with real amusement at this sally: Laurette fully knew the value of talking in an amusing way when she had an aim to serve. 'I mean real deception: abstracting letters, and having others written, and things like that, for which I have no doubt you could find awful names in some of your awful books.'
The judge fixed his gray, penetrating eyes on the softly pretty, exquisitely dressed young woman before him, vaguely wondering whose interest she had at heart in this inquiry. 'These bright, pretty young women have often a wonderfully altruistic vein in their natures,' he reflected. Then, in a very lucid unpedantic way, he pointed out that if people did things that had awful names in law-books, they might be brought to account; but people were not supposed to marry because other people abstracted letters or wrote sham ones. Marriage was a contract between this man and this woman for certain ends, clearly set forth in the Prayer-book and elsewhere and under certain conditions. If these conditions were observed, no alleged deception on the part of anyone else could, in the slightest, affect the contract.