The storm which had swept unheeded over the heads bent over the gaming-tables at the Kursaal that wild autumn night, was hardly wilder and fiercer than the tempest in Stewart Routh's soul, as he, making one of the number of the gamblers, played with a quite unaccustomed recklessness, and won with surprising sequence. This was earlier in the night, when the powers of the air were only marshalling their forces, and the elemental war had not extended beyond the skirmishing stage. Many times he looked impatiently round, even while the ball was rolling, as if expecting to see some one, who still did not appear; then he would turn again to the green board, again stake and win, and resume his watch. At length a touch on his elbow caused him to look round in a contrary direction, where he saw a man standing, who immediately handed him a note and went away. Then Routh smiled, read the words the note contained, smiled again, swept up the money which lay before him, and left the room. The battle had fairly begun as he stepped out from the shelter of the portico, and, buttoning his coat tightly across his chest, and pulling his hat down to his eyebrows, set himself, with bent head, against the storm. His way led him past his own lodgings, and as he took it on the opposite side of the street, he saw, indistinctly, Harriet's figure, as she sat close beside the window, her head against the panes. Something dreary and forsaken in the aspect of the window, with its flimsy curtains wide apart, the indistinct form close against the glass, no light within the room, made Routh shiver impatiently as he looked at it; and just then the light in the street flickered and swerved violently under the influence of a sudden blast, which drove a sharp cascade of rain rattling against the window.
"Moping there in the dark," said Routh, with an oath, "and making things a hundred times worse, with her cursed whining and temper."
The Schwarzchild mansion was near, and he was soon removed as far from all associations with discomfort and dreariness as brilliant light, a blazing fire of odorous wood burning in a room too large to be overheated by it, luxurious surroundings, and pleasant expectation could remove him from such discordant realities. Presently Mrs. Ireton P. Bembridge made her appearance. The room was a long one, and she entered by a door which faced the chimney where he was standing. Much as he had admired her, irresistibly as her beauty had captivated him with its ordinary charm, of recklessness and lustre, with its rare, far-between moments of softness and grace, he had never really understood until now how beautiful she was. For there was a mingling of both moods upon her as she came towards him, her amber silk dress, with the accustomed drapery of superb black lace falling round her, and sweeping the ground in folds such as surely no other mere gown, made by mundane milliner, had ever accomplished. Rich purple amethysts were on her neck and on her wrists, and gleamed on the comb which held the coils of her hair. Wax-lights in profusion shed their softened light upon her, upon the cream and rose tints of her brow and cheeks, upon the scarlet of her lips, upon the marvellous darkness of her eyes; and the capricious blaze from the burning logs shot quivering streaks of light among the folds of her dress, glancing over the jewels she wore, and playing redly on the hand which she held out, while yet some steps divided her from Routh, gazing at her in absorbed, almost amazed admiration.
"How tired and pale you look!" she said, as he took the proffered hand, and she allowed him to hold it. The words were slowly spoken, in the tone of solicitude for him, which is one of the most potent weapons in a beautiful woman's armoury. "Sit there," she went on, drawing her hand gently from his hold and indicating a seat, while she settled herself into the recesses of a huge German sofa. "How could you imagine I would go to the Kursaal to-night? Just listen!" She held her hand up; a cloud of filmy lace fell back from the beautiful round white arm. Then she dropped the hand slowly, and waited for him to speak. He spoke with strange difficulty; the spell of the power of her beauty was upon him. This was not what he had intended. He had meant to conquer, not to be conquered; to sway, not to be ruled.
"I thought," he said, in a low tone, "you would have come, because--I--I did not know you would allow me the happiness of coming here."
"Did you not? I think you don't understand me yet. I wished to see you, you know, and I did not wish to go out this evening. It is quite simple, is it not?"
"It is indeed, for such a woman as you."
She laughed.
"Is not that rather an awkward speech--rather an equivocal compliment? How posed you look!"
She laughed again, Routh felt unspeakably embarrassed; he had a sense of being at a disadvantage, which was unpleasant. She saw it, and said:
"What a temper you have! You'd be rather hard to please, I fancy, if one were in any sense bound to try."
"Don't jest with me," said Routh, suddenly and sternly, and he rolled his chair deliberately near her as he spoke. "You did not allow me, you did not invite me to come here to-night; you did not do this, which seems so 'simple' to you, because you are as much braver than every other woman as you are more beautiful,"--he looked into her dark eyes, and their lids did not droop,--"only to jest with me, only to trifle with me, as you trifle with others. You are a wonderfully puzzling woman, I acknowledge; no woman ever so puzzled me before. Each time I see you, there is something different, something new in your manner, and each time it is as though I had to begin all over again; as if I had not told you that I love you, as if you had not listened and confessed that you know it. Why have you sent for me? You dismissed me yesterday with something which you tried to make look and sound like anger--ineffectually, for you were not angry. And I was prepared for the same line of tactics to-day. Well, you send for me. I am here. You come to me a thousand times more beautiful"--he dropped his voice to a whisper, and she grew pale under the fixed fire of his eyes,--"infinitely more beautiful than I have ever seen you; and in your eyes and in your smile there is what I have never seen in them; and yet you meet me with mere jesting words. Now, this you do not mean; what is it that you do mean?"
He rose, and leaned against the mantelpiece, looking down upon her bent head, with the light shining on the jewels in her hair. She did not speak.
"What is that you do mean?" he repeated. She had laid one arm along the cushioned side of the sofa, the side near him. He clasped it, above the wrist, impressively, not caressingly, and at the touch, the words he had spoken to her before, "Would you not be afraid of a man who loved you with all the passion of his heart?" recurred to her, and she felt that so this man loved her, and that she was afraid of him.
"I dare say many others have loved you, and told you so," he continued, "and I don't ask you how you received their professions. I know the world too well, and what it brings to men and women, for any such folly. That is of the past. The present is ours. I ask you why you have brought me here? A woman who resents such words as those I have spoken to you before now, does not give a man the chance of repeating them. You have not sent for me to tell me that you are insulted and outraged, to talk the cant of a hypocritical society to me. I should not love you, beautiful as you are, if you were such a fool."
He saw that his audacity was not without its charm for her; her head was raised now, and her dark eyes, looking up, met his looking down, as she listened, with parted lips and deep-drawn breath.
"Be sure of this," he said, "no man has ever loved you as I love you, or been willing to stake so much upon your love." The sinister truth which lurked in these words lent the sinister expression to his face again for a moment which she had sometimes seen in it. "How much I stake upon it you will never know. So be it. I am ready, I am willing. You see I am giving you time. I am not hurrying you into rash speech. I dare say you were not at all prepared for this when you and I met, and you took the initiative in what you intended to be an ordinary watering-place flirtation--while you were waiting for Arthur Felton, perhaps?" he said, savagely, for, as he went on, the savage nature of the man was rising within him, and for all that his grasp was on her soft white arm, and his gaze was searching the depths of her dark eyes, he was speaking rather to himself than to her; rather to the unchained devil within, than to the beautiful fatality before him.
"It is possible you had some such notion," he said. "I don't ask you to acknowledge it, for if so, you have abandoned it." He stooped lower, his eyes looked closer into hers. She shrank back, and covered her face with her disengaged hand. "Yes," he went on, in a gentle tone, "I know you soon discovered that I am not made for make-believes; and now--now that you have sent for me, and I am here, what is it that you mean? You cannot make me the pastime of an hour; you cannot shake off the hold which such love as mine lays upon your life--would still lay upon it were you a feebler woman than you are. What then? Are you going to take the wine of life, or are you going to content yourself with the vapid draughts you have hitherto drank? You must tell me, and tell me to-night, what it is you mean; for a crisis in my life is come, and I must know, without paltering or delay, how it is to be dealt with."
He lifted his hand from her arm, and standing directly before her, bade her look up and speak to him. She did not move. Then he sat down on a velvet footstool before her sofa, and drew her hands away from before her face. There were signs of agitation on it, and he read them, not quite correctly perhaps, but to his own satisfaction.
"Listen to me," he said, in the gentlest tones within the compass of his voice. "I have a right--have I not?--to ask you, to know what is your meaning towards me? What did you bring me here for? Remember the words I have spoken to you, not once only, or twice; remember the story I told you on the balcony yonder; remember the tone you have occasionally adopted in all your levity, and then do not attempt to deny my right to speak as I am speaking, and to demand your answer."
"You--you found me alone here--in my own house--and--"
"Absurd!" he cried. "You are talking nonsense, and you know it. Did you not intend me to understand that I should find you alone? Did your note, your summons (I tore it up, but you remember the words as well as I do), mean anything else? Do you not know this is all folly? There is no need t............