Under Lock and Key: A Story. Volume 3 (of 3)

by T. W. Speight

The evenings were growing rather chilly, and a small fire had been lighted. Mr. Van Loal, now stripped of his furs and appearing in ordinary evening dress, with the most expansive of shirt-fronts and the stiffest of white neckcloths, had got as near the fire as he well could, and was warming his thin white hands over the flickering blaze.

Mirpah, with one elbow resting on the chimney-piece, was standing near him, looking, Ducie thought, even more beautiful in her black filmy evening dress than she had looked in her travelling costume. One thing Ducie could not help noticing--that on the hands both of father and daughter there glittered several very magnificent rings. Other jewellery they wore none.

As Captain Ducie advanced up the room, Miss Van Loal crossed over to the other side to look at some stuffed birds. Accidentally or purposely she dropped her handkerchief. It had scarcely touched the ground before Captain Ducie had recovered it. With a smile and a bow he gave it back to its owner.

The ice had been broken, and presently Mr. Van Loal and the captain were conversing easily and confidentially about the island, its scenery, its history, and its climate. Mirpah glided back to her father's side. She did not join in the conversation, but once or twice Ducie caught her eyes fixed on his face with an expression in them that was flattering to his vanity.

When dinner was announced he did not fail to secure for himself the chair next to that of Mirpah. There was something about this dark-eyed beauty that took his fancy amazingly. His powers of fascination were in danger of growing rusty from disuse. He was glad that an opportunity had arisen which would allow him to prove, were it only for his own satisfaction, that his old prowess with the sex had not quite deserted him.

Here was no fashionable young lady, the butterfly of a hundred drawing-rooms, to subdue; but something far more unconventional: a woman altogether unused to so-called fashionable life, as his critical glance had told him in a moment; but still an undoubted lady, and the possessor of a pair of the most unfathomable eyes that his own had ever gazed into. Therefore he sat down to the siege he had proposed to himself with an alacrity that was infinitely refreshing to him after his long severance from the delights of female society.

Later on, Captain Ducie proposed a stroll along the pier. Mr. Van Loal and his daughter at once assented.

The night was warm and a full moon was sailing through the sky. Faint strains of music came wafted from afar, and mingled with the plash of the incoming tide. Could anyone have questioned Captain Ducie on the point, he would have declared that his "spooning" days had come to an end twenty years before, and he would have believed his own statement. Men in love he was in the habit of regarding with good-natured cynicism as though they were in a state of temporary insanity superinduced by their own folly, and were not to be held accountable like ordinary mortals. But to-night, what with the moonlight, the music, the rhythmic beat of the waves on the sands; and the propinquity of Mirpah Van Loal, Captain Ducie felt the first delicious symptoms of a fever to which his blood had been a stranger for years.

After he had parted for the night from Van Loal and his charming daughter, and was in the solitude of his own bedroom, he laughed aloud to think how very like a greenhorn who had fallen in love for the first time he had felt that evening. He recognised the feeling, and was contemptuous of himself even while revelling in the unaccustomed sweetness. It was a sweetness that waited on his dreams all the night long, and when he opened his eyes next morning he felt as though Time's finger had moved back the figures on the dial of his life, and that he was not only a boy in years again, but also--and that would have been the greater miracle of the two--once more a boy at heart.

But he was a middle-aged cynic again the moment he put his foot out of bed. There is no disenchanter like the clear cold light of morning. It was not that he deemed Mirpah one whit less beautiful than she had seemed in his eyes the previous night. He was savage with himself for allowing any woman, however fascinating she might be, to touch his cold heart with the flame of a torch that for him had long been quenched in the waters of Lethe.