He would carry his love to the world's end, beyond the reach of shame. Nothing mattered but Vera. Yes, there was one who mattered. His mother! But to-night he could not even think of her, or if he thought of her it was to tell himself that if Provana divorced his wife, and he and Vera were married, his mother would be reconciled to the inevitable. Her religion would be a stumbling block. To her mind such a marriage would be no marriage. To-night he could not reason, he would not see obstacles in his path. Vera's pale looks and anxious questions had been a confession of love, a forecast of surrender; and in the tumult of his thoughts there was no room for hesitation or for fear.
He thought of his love now as duty. It was his duty to rescue this dear girl from a loveless union with a hard man of business, old enough to be her father, from splendours and luxuries that had become as dust and ashes. He had known for a long time that she cared for him; but he had never reckoned the strength of her attachment. Only this afternoon, in her radiant happiness, as they walked through the unromantic streets; only in her pale distress to-night, as she questioned him, had he discovered his power: and now there seemed to be but one possible issue—a new life for them both.
His mother's absence from London was an inexpressible relief to him. How could he have met the tender questioning of the eyes that watched over his life, and had learned how to read his mind from the time when thought began? How could he have hidden the leaping, passionate thoughts, the sense of a crisis in his fate, the ardent expectation, the dream of joy, the fever and excitement in the mind of a man who is making his plan of a new life, a life of exquisite happiness?
CHAPTER XI
It was Saturday, and they were at River Mead—one of those ideal places that seem to have been raised along the upper Thames by an enchanter's wand rather than by the vulgar arts of architect and builder, so exquisitely do they harmonise with the landscape that enshrines them.
No hideous chimney, no mammoth reservoir, no thriving metropolitan High Street, defiled the neighbourhood of River Mead. All around was rustic peace. Green meadows and blue waters, amidst which there lay gardens that had taken a century to make—grass walks between yew hedges, and labyrinths of roses; and in the distance purple woods that melted into a purple horizon. It was a place that people always thought of as steeped in golden sunlight; but not even in the glory of a midsummer afternoon was River Mead quite as lovely as on such a night as this, when Claude and Vera strolled slowly along the river path, in the silver light of a great round moon, hung in the blue deep of a sky without a cloud.
The magic of night and moonshine was upon everything; the mystery of light and shadow gave a charm to things that were commonplace by day—to the white balustrade in front of the drawing-rooms, to the flight of steps and the marble vases, above which the lighted windows shone golden, the gaudy yellow light of indoor lamps shamed by the white glory of the moon.
The windows were all open, and the voices of the card-players travelled far in the clear air—they could even hear the light sound of their cards, manipulated by a dexterous hand. Everybody was playing bridge, everybody was absorbed in the game, winning or losing, happy or unhappy, but absorbed—except these two. Everybody except these two, who had been missing since ten o'clock; and the great stable clock had sounded its twelve slow, sonorous strokes half an hour ago. They had not been wanted. The tables were all full. Two or three of the players had looked round the room once or twice, and, noting their absence, had exchanged the quiet smile, the almost imperceptible elevation of arched eyebrows, with which, in a highly civilised community, characters can be killed. For Lady Okehampton—she who had more than once sounded the note of warning, and who should have been on the alert to see danger signals—from the moment the tables were opened and the players seated, the world of men and women outside that charmed space—where cards fluttered lightly upon smooth green cloth, four eager faces watching them as they fell—had ceased to exist. She was not a stupid woman; but she had a mind that moved slowly, and she could not think of two serious things at once. For her bridge was a serious thing; and from tea-time on Saturday till this Sunday midnight bridge had occupied all her thoughts, to the exclusion of every other consideration. Smiles might be exchanged and eyebrows raised when, on Sunday morning, Claude Rutherford carried off her niece two miles up the river to a village church, which by his account was a gem in early Gothic that was worth more than the two miles' sculling a light skiff against the current; but Lady Okehampton was too absorbed even to wonder whether there was anything not quite correct in the excursion. Why should not people want to see the old church at Allersley? It was one of the lions of the neighbourhood, and counted among the attractions of River Mead.
Lady Okehampton's cards on Saturday night had seemed to be dealt to her by a malignant fiend, an invisible devil guiding the smooth white hands of human dealers. She had lain awake till the Sunday morning bells were ringing for the early service to which good people were going, fresh and light of foot, with minds at ease. She had tossed and turned in her sumptuous bed in a feverish unrest, playing her miserable hands over and over again, with the restless blood in her brain going round and round like a mill wheel, or plunging backwards and forwards like a piston rod. There had been no time to think of Vera and Claude. She could think only of Sunday evening, and of her chance of revenge. It was not that she minded her money losses, which were despicable when reckoned against the price of Okehampton's autumn sport. Two thousand pounds for a grouse moor and a salmon river—an outlay of which he talked as lightly as if it were a new hat. The money was nothing. He would give as much for an Irish setter as she lost in an evening. But the vexation and humiliation of a long evening's bad luck were too much for nerves that had been strained to snapping point by many seasons of experimental treatment, all over Europe; and the mistress of River Mead had left her visitors to amuse themselves at their own sweet will, until dinner-time on Sunday evening, while their hostess slept in her easy-chair by the open window of her morning-room, soothed by the lullaby of the stream running down the weir, and sweet airs from a garden of roses, such roses as only grow in a riverside garden.