Lucian the dreamer

by J. S. Fletcher

She nodded her head as if she quite understood his meaning, and he, looking full at her again, noticed that she was trying to moisten her lips with the tip of her tongue, and that her eyes were dilated to an unusual degree.

‘You can’t say that I’ve treated you badly,’ he said. ‘After all, you had the first chance, and it wasn’t my fault if you threw it away. There, now, be sensible and go back to London and make it up with Damerel. You can easily get round him—he’ll believe anything you tell him. Say you were upset at the thought of going to Italy with him, and lost your head. Things will come all right if you only manage your cards properly. Well, I’m going—good-day.’

He turned slowly from her as if he were somewhat ashamed of his desertion. They had been standing by the side of a table, littered about on which were several odds and ends picked up by Haidee on the previous day. Amongst them was an antique stiletto, sharp as a needle, which had taken her fancy at a shop in the Palais Royal. She had thought of using it as a hat-pin, and was charmed when the dealer suggested that it had probably tasted the heart’s-blood of more than one victim. Its glitter caught her eye now, and she picked it up and struck furiously at Darlington’s back.

At that moment Lucian was being conducted to his wife’s room by a courteous manager. At the threshold they paused, brought to a simultaneous standstill by a wild scream. When they entered the room, Darlington lay crumpled up and dead in the centre of the floor, and Haidee, gazing spellbound at him from the furthest corner, was laughing—a long, low ripple of laughter that seemed as if it would never cease. The stiletto, thrown at her feet, flashed back a ray of sunlight from the window.

CHAPTER XXVI

That afternoon Saxonstowe arrived in town from Yorkshire with a grim determination in his heart to have it out once and for all with Sprats. He had tried to do his duty as a country squire and to interest himself in country life and matters: he had hunted the fox and shot pheasants, sat on the bench at petty and at quarter sessions, condoled with farmers on poor prices and with old women on bad legs, and he was still unsatisfied and restless and conscious of wanting something. The folk round about him came to the conclusion that he was not as other young men of his rank and wealth—he seemed inclined to bookishness, he was a bit shy and a little bit stand-offish in manner, and he did not appear to have much inclination for the society of neighbours in his own station of life. Before he succeeded to the title Saxonstowe had not been much known in the neighbourhood. He had sometimes visited his predecessor as a schoolboy, but the probability of his becoming the next Lord Saxonstowe was at that time small, and no one had taken much notice of Master Richard Feversham. When he came back to the place as lord and master, what reputation he had was of a sort that scarcely appealed to the country people. He had travelled in some fearsome countries where no other man had ever set foot, and he had written a great book about his adventures, and must therefore be a clever young man. But he was not a soldier, nor a sailor, and he did not particularly care for hunting or shooting, and was therefore somewhat of a hard nut to crack. The honest gentlemen who found fox-hunting the one thing worth living for could scarcely realise that even its undeniable excitements were somewhat tame to a man who had more than once taken part in a hunt in which he was the quarry, and they were disposed to regard the new Viscount Saxonstowe as a bit of a prig, being unconscious that he was in reality a very simple-minded, unaffected young man who was a little bit embarrassed by his title and his wealth. As for their ladies, it was their decided opinion that a young peer of such ancient lineage and such great responsibilities should marry as soon as possible, and each believed that it was Lord Saxonstowe’s bounden duty to choose a wife from one of the old north-country families. In this Saxonstowe agreed with them. He desired a wife, and a wife from the north country, and he knew where to find her, and wanted her so much that it had long been evident to his sober judgment that, failing her, no other woman would ever call him husband. The more he was left alone, the more deeply he sank in the sea of love. And at last he felt that life was too short to be trifled with, and he went back to Sprats and asked her firmly and insistently to marry him.

Sprats was neither hurt nor displeased nor surprised. She listened silently to all he had to say, and she looked at him with her usual frankness when he had finished.

‘I thought we were not to talk of these matters?’ she said. ‘We were to be friends—was there not some sort of compact?’

‘If so, I have broken it,’ he answered—‘not the friendship—that, never!—but the compact. Besides, I don’t remember anything about that. As to talking of this, well, I intend to go on asking you to marry me until you do.’

‘You have not forgotten what I told you?’ she said, eyeing him with some curiosity.