Wyllard's Weird: A Novel

by M. E. Braddon

"Because they are considered so"—casting about for a mild expression—"confoundedly unlucky. I remember the morning of the Oaks, the year my Cherryripe shut up like a telescope half a furlong from the winning-post, my sister Grace drove up to Hatchett's to meet the drag—I was to drive her and a lot of 'em to Epsom, don't you know—with an infernal pork-pie hat made out of a peacock's breast. 'What did you wear that damn thing for?' I asked. 'Because it's the fashion,' says she. 'Shouldn't wonder if my mare lost the race on account of your damn tile,' says I. Grace chaffed me for my superstition; but the mare made a most unaccountable mess of herself, don't you know, and the Devil himself or that peacock-feather hat must have been at the bottom of it."

"I don't think the peacocks' feathers will make any difference to me," replied Valeria wearily. "I have been unlucky all my life."

"Well, Fate has been rather hard upon you," said Sir George, drawing his chair a little nearer to hers, gazing at the delicate profile with a more ardent look than was quite within the lines of friendship and good-fellowship. "A beautiful young woman married to a man old enough to be her grandfather, carried off to broil away her existence in Bengal, when she ought to have been one of the queens of London society—stinted to a bare allowance of pin-money, hardly enough to pay her dressmaker, by Jove, when she ought to have had the command of her husband's purse. Why not cut the whole business, Valeria, and go to the south of France with me, directly after the Newmarket week? I stand to win a pot of money, and we can spend it merrily at Monaco. I know how to make plenty more when that's gone. And by and by, when the General goes off the hooks, we can make things fair and square with the world—or before, if you'd rather not wait. The thing can be so easily managed. Look at your cousin, Lady Cassandra, and the Colonel, and the Duke and his Countess—change of partners all round."

He tried to encircle the slim waist with his strong arm—the arm of a man who had won cups at Lillie Bridge in days gone by—but Valeria snatched herself from him with a disdainful laugh, rose from her chair, and walked to the other end of the verandah, he following her, sorely disconcerted. He had been watching for his opportunity, and he fancied the opportunity had come. He had neither creed nor principles of his own, and he believed that people who pretended to be better than himself were all hypocrites. Like Dumas' hero, he was ready to admit that there might be good women in the world, only he had never happened to meet with one.

He had made himself useful to Lady Valeria: had told her what horses to back, and had helped her to win a good deal of money since her return to England. Her losses had been the result of her own inspirations: and of late, when she had so lost, Sir George had found her the money to settle with the bookmen. And having done all this, and having devoted all his leisure to the cultivation of Lady Valeria's acquaintance, he deemed that the time was ripe for him to ask her to run away with him. He had run away with so many women in the course of the last twenty years that his manner of proposing the thing had become almost a formula. He modified his appeal according to the rank of the adored one—had his first, second, and third class supplications; but it was not in his nature to be poetical. Had he been making love to an empress, he could not have risen to any loftier height than that which he had reached to-night.

Lady Valeria turned at the end of the verandah, and faced him deliberately in the bright, cold moonlight, a white and ghostlike figure, with pale face and flashing eyes. She measured him from head to foot with a look of unqualified scorn; gazed at him steadily, with eyes that seemed to read all the secrets of his evil life; and then, slowly unfurling her peacock fan, she broke into a silvery laugh, long and clear and sweet, but with a ring of contemptuousness in its every note.

"You are mistaken, Sir George," she said quietly, moving towards the open window of the corridor, as if to return to the house. "Your almost infallible judgment is at fault. I am not that kind of person."

She would have passed him and gone into the house, but he put himself between her and the open window. He barred her way with all the hulk of his handsome, over-dressed person. That ringing laughter, the insolent sparkle in her magnificent eyes, goaded him to madness. Sir George had a diabolical temper, and the insensate vanity of a successful roué. That any woman could really despise him was beyond his power of belief; but a woman who pretended to despise him put herself beyond the pale of his courtesy.

"No," he muttered savagely. "You are not that kind of person. You are not that kind of person for me, because for the last three years you have been that kind of person for somebody else. I thought you must have been tired of Bothwell Grahame by this time, and that I should have had my chance."

In a breath, as if from the stroke of a Cyclops hammer, George Varney had measured his length upon the tesselated pavement under the verandah. It was an old man's arm that felled him; but an athlete of five-and-twenty could not have struck a firmer blow.