CHAPTER XXVI.
NOT LOVE, BUT PITY.
Doris’ own face grew a little paler as she looked at him, so haggard was his; and yet his pallor lent an added charm to his delicately-cut features and expressive, deeply-colored eyes bent upon her with a strange, intent look, as she sat on the edge of the hammock, and half trembling, for she knew not what reason, waited for him to speak. She was startled by the changed appearance of the man, who was usually self-possession itself. He stood for a moment in silence, leaning against one of the trees to which the hammock was slung, his arms folded, his head sunk on his breast, and a nightingale in a neighboring tree commenced to sing; all her life afterward Doris never heard a nightingale without recalling this night.
“Miss Marlowe,” he said, at last, and he spoke in a voice so low that it seemed to harmonize with the voice of the bird. “If I were wise I should let you go, even now! But—I cannot, I cannot! Chance is too strong for me. It sent you back to find me—as you found me, and I must speak to you, and perhaps for the last time. I am leaving the villa—Italy. I go to England to-morrow.”
Doris glanced up at him; a streak of light from one of the brilliant windows fell across his handsome face, and she saw that, with all his self-command, his lips trembled.
“I am sorry,” she murmured, and a faint thrill of regret stirred her. She knew that he had been her friend, that with all his apparent coldness and reserve he had never lost an opportunity of quietly serving her. “I am afraid you have heard bad news.”
“No,” he said. “I have heard no bad news, for the best of reasons; there is no one to send me news of any kind, bad or good. I am a man without a friend in the world.”
“Ah, no!” she said, almost inaudibly.
“I am not forgetting you, nor Lady Despard,” he said. “But you—but Lady Despard, for whose kindness I am, and shall ever be, grateful—will she remember me after one week’s absence, excepting as that of the man whose voice helped to while away an idle half-hour, and amuse her friends? And why should she?” he added, not bitterly, but with a grave sadness that touched Doris deeply. “I am, as I have always been, alone in the world—a man of no account, a speck of dust dancing in the sunbeam one moment, the next, floating in the gutter. Don’t think I say this to excite your pity. No! It is because I want you to remember what I am, how worthless and insignificant—just Percy Levant, ‘the man who sings for Lady Despard!’”
He smiled with a bitter self-scorn which lent to his face an air of tragedy that fascinated Doris.