“Not much longer,” he replied, leaning against the carriage, and averting his face from the gaze of her sharp, keen eyes. “Horses are not machines, you must remember, and want rest sometimes.”
“Horses, I don’t call them horses,” she said, contemptuously; “they are living skeletons. I am so tired of sitting here!”
“Will you come inside the inn?” he asked, with a barely concealed weariness.
“Oh, no, thanks. I know what that means. These inns are a disgrace to any civilized country. What with the smell of garlic and the dreadful men hanging about them, they are too awful. If you could get me a glass of wine, of decent wine, dear——”
“All right,” he said, and went into the inn. “Give me a bottle of the best wine you have got, and a glass of brandy,” he said to the landlord, and he drank the latter almost at a draught, his hand shaking as he carried the glass to his lips. If he had seen a ghost instead of sweet Doris Marlowe, he could not have been more completely unmanned and upset. Indeed, he had seen a ghost; the ghost of his lost happiness and wrecked life, and she was to marry this stranger, this Percy Levant; what had become of the Mr. Garland, with whom she had sailed to Australia, then? He was so lost in troubled reverie that he had quite forgotten Lady Grace, until the familiar, too familiar, “Ce—cil,” issuing from the carriage, recalled his wandering mind.
He caught up the wine bottle and a glass and strode back to the carriage, filled with that weariness and despair which renders every moment of existence almost unendurable to the galley slave and convict. At that moment he would have given half a continent, had he possessed it, to be alone and free to indulge in his sad and bitter reflections.
Unknown to the valet, the Pescia doctor had telegraphed to him a few days ago, and he had told Lady Grace that he must start for Italy, and at once. Much to his surprise, to his embarrassment, also, she had declared her intention of accompanying him. The fact must be stated, alas! that Lady Grace could not endure her lover’s absence from her side, even for a few days. Her love for him—her passion, as it must be called—had become the absorbing sentiment of her life, and, like all absorbing emotions, it tortured her. She knew, knew for a certainty, that he did not love her, and all her days and nights were filled by a devouring jealousy and discontent. She was rendered wretched if he spoke to or danced with a young and pretty girl. She was jealous of his past as a whole, but madly, fiercely jealous of the girl Doris Marlowe, from whom she had, by the assistance of Spenser Churchill, succeeded in separating him.
She knew he did not love her; that she had entrapped him into the engagement, and she dreaded with an agony of apprehension lest anything should occur to separate them. It is not too much to say that she hated the marquis for being ill and causing the postponement of her marriage. A woman, when she knows that love is returned, is full of trust and confidence, but Lady Grace, knowing that Cecil bore her no love, was full of distrust and suspicion, doubt, and fear. She was never happy, nor at ease, unless he was in her sight, and she found it simply impossible to allow him to go to Italy without her. Sometimes, in the dead of night, she would awake with a start and a cry of terror from a nightmare in which she had dreamed that he had discovered her share in the plot which had robbed him of Doris and bound him to herself, and by day she lived in a constant dread that some accident would reveal the conspiracy and deprive her of him.
So intense an anxiety began to tell upon her, and already there were lines and wrinkles on the face which artists had painted and of which poets had sung.
To put it briefly, Lady Grace’s punishment had commenced even in the first hour of her triumph! Black care sits behind every sorrow, but he is never more safely seated than when he rides behind the man or woman whose success depends upon a lie.