With all his starved heart, all his repressed soul, all his mutinous body, Charles Halsey loved Virginia Rawn.
CHAPTER VIII
THEY WHO WATER WITH TEARS
I
As at last the news of John Rawn's collapse broke full and fair—disastrous enough to please even his late warmest friends. The stock markets, East and West, became scenes of riot. The truth, of course, had leaked out regarding Rawn's fight in the last ditch. The newspapers swarmed upon Graystone Hall, besieging any who could be found. Halsey refused to talk, and moreover, Rawn could not be found. This threw them upon their own resources, and what they did not know they imagined. Even thus, the wildest of them all could not imagine half; the shrewdest of the journalists could not get their hands on the "inside story" here. No one in or around or back of the stock exchanges could be found possessed of secret information which he was willing to impart. Throughout wild hours of hurrying, telegraphing, investigating, the papers kept up their frenzied search for the truth, and found it not, and knew they had not found it.
Halsey, one morning after a sleepless night, more than a week after Rawn's departure to New York, secured copies of each of the morning papers. He stood uncertain, in the great central room of Graystone Hall, with these black and frowning messengers of fate in his hands, scarce daring to look at them. He felt some sense of definite disaster at hand. He glanced at last at one, and started as though struck. Calling a servant, he sent word to Mrs. Rawn inquiring if he might meet her at once.
She joined him presently, smiling faintly, giving him her hand, then leading him to a breakfast table on the long gallery facing the lake front, a favorite spot with her. She gave the butler orders to serve them breakfast here at once; for she now learned Halsey had neither slept nor eaten. Halsey did not learn that the same also was true of her.
II
They seated themselves and for the time said nothing, each gazing out over the lake. The morning was calm and beautiful. The blue lake, just dotted with little whitecap rolling waves, seemed in amiable mood, and purred gently along the sea-wall, below the green and curving terrace which ran down from the gallery front. A bird chirped here and there.
Little enough the peaceful scene reflected the feelings of these, its only human figures. Virginia Rawn was pale. Dark rings showed below her eyes. Her mouth drooped just a trifle, plaintively, in a way not usual with her. She was pale, paler than her usual clean and clear ivory. Yet she was coolly beautiful in her morning gown of light figured lawn, with its wide, flowing sleeves, showing her round white arms. Halsey, frowningly serious, felt the charm of her rise about him, overwhelm him. He knew that the hour had come for him in more ways than one; that hers, for ever, was the one face and figure and voice and presence for him, hopeless and unhappy, and doomed for ever so to remain. She was not his wife. She was the wife of another man—of his enemy; the man in all the world least like himself; the man who, by virtue of that unlikeness, had won this woman for his own. What hope for him, Charles Halsey, for whom was no place in the world?