Guy Kenmore's Wife, and The Rose and the Lily

Suddenly someone comes up to him—an acquaintance he has formed in London, and who has, somehow, found his way to this secluded spot.

"Ah, Charteris, how-de-do," the new-comer says, unceremoniously. "Who is the dark-eyed beauty? I've been watching her this half hour."

"Which one, Sir George?" with affected nonchalance.

"By Jove! there is but one, you know, the divinity in white lace and yellow roses. I saw you speaking to her just now," returns Sir George Wilde, with a look of interest in his handsome brown eyes.

"That!" says Mr. Charteris, "oh, that is—Miss Langton," with a curious hesitation over the name.

"Friend of yours?" inquires the dashing young baronet.

"Slight acquaintance," Charteris answers, warily.

"A compatriot, I take it," pursues Sir George.

Vane nods affirmatively.

"You'll introduce me, then?"

"With her permission," Vane responds, a trifle stiffly.

"That, of course," laughs Sir George.

A little later Vane goes to her to proffer his request. She stands for the moment alone in the embrasure of a window, her dark eyes turned from the giddy dancers out upon the mystic, lonely sea, with the moon and stars asleep upon its breast. He tells her, watching the bright face narrowly, that an English baronet has been so attracted by her beauty that he desires an introduction. Will she accord it?

The laughing, dark eyes, a spice of mischief in their starry depths, glance up into his own.

"A baronet!" she says, making a little round O of her rosy mouth. "Do you think, Mr. Charteris, I could really bear the burden of such an honor without being crushed by it?"

"You can but try," he retorts, lightly. "England expects every man and every woman to do their duty."

"Then I am ready for the sacrifice," she laughs, as lightly.

He looks at her a moment in thoughtful silence.

"Well?" she asks, interpreting a question in his look.

"It is this, then, Reine: I am placed in an awkward position. How shall I introduce you—as Miss Langton, or as—as Mrs. Charteris?"

He flushes uncomfortably as the words leave his lips. His bride's face reflects the crimson glow. After a minute she replies, with outward indifference:

"Better, perhaps, as—Miss Langton, according to our agreement this morning."

Some slight feeling of pique rises in his heart. He will not own to himself that when he condescended to ask her the question he had thought to give her pleasure, and had felt, too, that he should not be ashamed to see this peerlessly-lovely girl wearing his name.

"Perhaps she does not really care for me as she pretended," he thinks to himself, and the first spark of jealousy is lighted in his heart when he sees her long lashes fall before Sir George's admiring gaze, and sees with what calm and graceful self-possession she acknowledges the introduction to the handsome, titled nobleman. "Who would have thought, when she first came to Langton Villa, that the wild little 'school ma'am' had so much dignity?" he thinks. "Is it, after all, a new phase of her character, or was I simply blinded then by my admiration for Maud? It seems that Sir George is irresistibly attracted by her graces. What can he see in the girl that I was blind to?"

And full of this wonder, he sets himself to watch the young baronet, who hovers around Reine with the palpable desire of the "moth for the star."

The whole room sees his admiration, and smiles at the fair American's conquest.

Vane is a good deal amused, and unknowingly piqued.

"What barefaced admiration," he says, within himself. "The young dandy is falling in love with my wife, confound him!"

CHAPTER XVI

At a rather early hour the next morning, Mr. Charteris is astir, and out upon the sands.

Not so early as some others, though, he finds, for in a merry group of young people on the sands, he meets Sir George Wilde in close proximity to Reine. Vane, giving them a careless good-morning, passes on to some little distance, where he pauses with folded arms, and a slightly sulky aspect, to look out over the wide waste of heaving sea, his shapely back turned resolutely on the merry-makers.

"Confound the fellow's impudence," he remarks to himself, with needless savagery. "How he follows her around. Of course she would rather be with me. She loves me, or pretends to."

Why he should feel vexed at Sir George's monopoly of his, Vane's, unloved bride he could not explain to himself. Yet the feeling is there.

Glancing furtively over his shoulder, and seeing the undeniably handsome and well-matched pair strolling on side by side, creates a feeling of decided ill-humor within him.

"It is quite a flirtation," he tells himself. "Reine should know better, being a married woman. But perhaps she has taken a fancy to the fellow. Perhaps she was mistaken in the notion that she cared for me. She had seen no one else then. But now, meeting this handsome, spoony young baronet, she may regret this nasty marriage as much as I do."

While these thoughts flash through his mind, the gay hum of voices die away. The party have gone out of sight, and a sudden resolution comes into Vane's mind.

"I'll go and breakfast with the old gentleman again," he thinks. "After all it's only the proper thing to call and inquire for his health. Of course Reine will not have come in from her walk yet."

In this he deceives himself. Reine is there by the side of the old man's couch, with a lapful of rosy-tinted shells which she is displaying with a good deal of childish pleasure in their acquisition.

"Sir George found this one; isn't it a beauty?" she is saying, vivaciously, as the door opens, and Mr. Charteris is ushered in.

A start, a blush, a dimpling smile. She rises, gathering her treasures, child-like, in her apron overskirt.

Mr. Charteris, vouchsafing her a careless nod, passes on to Mr. Langton.

"I hope I find you better this morning, and rested?" he observes, taking the chair Reine places, without seeming to see her.

"A trifle easier, yes," Mr. Langton responds, with more than ordinary graciousness, and then Vane steals a furtive glance at Reine.

Some of the brightness that came into her face at his entrance has faded from it. She has quietly seated herself again, her long lashes droop to the shells in her lap, which she fingers rather at random.

"So the baronet helped you gather shells," he remarks, condescendingly.

She looks up, with returning smiles.

"Yes," she returns, spreading the pretty collection out to view. "Will you look at them? Some are quite pretty."

"Reine has been telling me about your friend," put in Mr. Langton. "He was very kind."

"Not my friend, a mere acquaintance," Vane replies with acerbity. "I saw him a few times in London; he is wild, rather."

"Indeed! and I thought him so nice," Reine says, with dismay.

"So he is nice; wildness, a little, you know, doesn't count," Vane hastens to say, ashamed of the spirit in which he has spoken a moment before. "Sir George is unexceptionable, rich, titled, and all that. He is what the ladies term a most desirable parti. A pity you are a-a-already married, Reine."

"Were I free he could be nothing to me," Reine retorts, a crimson flame coming to her cheeks.

Mr. Langton, struck by something in Vane's tone, looks from one to the other of the flushed faces, and says, laughingly:

"O-ho, my fine young lad, jealous, are you?"

Mr. Charteris is positively indignant.

"Don't tease, if you please, Mr. Langton," he retorts, with immense dignity. "Jealousy only exists with love, you know. And I haven't pretended to fall in love with my wife yet!"

With this most ungenerous stab, he flies out of the room in a passion.

The rosy-lipped shells fall unheeded from Reine's lap to the floor as she rises and stands before her uncle, the bitter tears of shame crowding into her eyes.

"Oh, Uncle Langton, how could you—how could you?" she cries, in bitter distress. "It—it is too—too absurd. He never could, you know–"

"There—there, don't cry, dear," he soothes, gently. "I am an old bungler, I know, and I shouldn't have said it so plain, but the fact remains. Vane Charteris, whether he knows it or not, is falling in love with you, my dear, and is correspondingly jealous of the baronet's attentions to you."

The beautiful dark eyes looked at him incredulously. She shakes her head.

"You are mistaken," she answers, decidedly. "Your hopes mislead you. Confess now," smiling pensively through her tears, "that 'the wish was father to the thought.'"

"Perhaps so," he answers, willing to drop the subject and sorry he had agitated it.

Vane goes home rather ruefully, without breakfasting with Mr. Langton, as he had promised himself.

"What possessed me to be so rude, I wonder?" he soliloquizes. "Though I did not love her, it was awkward and ill-considered to cast it in her teeth. I begin to believe that it is I who am brusk and unmannerly, not she."

The day goes, long and wearily it seems to Vane, who is conscious of some new feeling he cannot realize, perhaps does not try to.

He smokes and reads, turning an unsociable cold shoulder on the rather dry habitues of the hotel. In the evening, drawn by "a spirit in his feet," and thoroughly ennuyed with his own society, he saunters over to the Sea View Hotel.

On his way he meditates rather slowly.

"It is doubtful whether she will receive me," his musings run. "I was rude this morning. Of course the little spitfire will resent it. She has too much spirit to tamely brook such shameless impudence. I certainly forgot myself in my vexation at that stupid old man."

The wide balcony of the Sea View presents a pleasant sight. A dozen or two of "young men and maidens" are assembled on it, some sitting, some walking, but one and all flirting with the greatest interest and delight.

Vane's quick eye singles out one solitary figure sitting apart from the rest, a slight, girlish one in white, the dark head bent over a book.

To this figure Vane goes forward, not without a lurking dread of meeting a petulant repulse.

He stops behind her chair, and Reine, startled, looks around.

Vane is relieved to find that there is no resentment in her face, only a new, sweet gravity a little strange to see on the piquant, girlish face.

"Ah, it is you, Mr. Charteris!" she says, carelessly. "You left us so unceremoniously this morning, I fear—thought you would not return."

Vane slips into the chair beside her, his heart unconsciously lightened of the burden that has weighed it down all day.

"To tell the truth I was half-afraid to come," he answers; "I was very rude to you this morning, and I knew you had reason to resent it, and expected you would. You remember you were wont to give me a piece of your mind very often in the days 'when we were first acquainted.'"

"Yes, but things are changed, you know," she returns, gently.

Reine is changed too. The thought flashes over him suddenly as he looks at her keenly, taking advantage of her momentary obliviousness of his presence.

She has folded her very small and slender white hands across the book in her lap, and is gazing a little dreamily out to sea.

The dark eyes are not so free and glad as they were of old.

They have grown larger and vaguely sad, the peachy cheek, rounded daintily like a child's, is pale to-day, the crimson lips have a slight, pathetic droop. Something in the softened loveliness of the brilliant face goes to his heart like a wordless reproach.

For a moment he regrets the arch, daring, sparkling face that used to flash defiance at him and his opinions.

"You are changed, too, Reine," he says, unconsciously putting his thought into words. "You used to scold me when I was naughty. I hope you are not afraid of me now because you are my wife?"

A great wave of color surges into her cheek at his words. She turns on him the half-shy gaze of the frank, dark eyes.

"Afraid of you—oh, no, it is not that," she says. "But you disliked my wild ways so much that I have tried to be more what you wished me, more dignified, more gentle."

He looks at her with a half question in his blue eyes, a flush on his handsome face.

"Like Maud," she explains, further.

"Like Maud—why, really," he begins, with supreme anger and sarcasm, but she interrupts him, somewhat incoherently:

"I thought—I was told, I mean that—that I was to stay with Uncle Langton a year, and be formed over into a woman like Maud."

His blue eyes darken with shame and anger.

"So you have heard that!" he says, with self-contempt. "I was a fool, a dolt. Give over the attempt, Reine. You can never be like Maud any more than—than a rose is like a lily!"

"So I thought," she answers, visibly abashed. "Maud is so grand, and white, and queenly, and I am so little, and dark, and ugly."

"That is not true," he answers, hastily. "You are beautiful, Reine. I am sure you know that. You are like a beautiful 'queen-rose,' all sweetness, color and dew, 'set round with little willful thorns.' Maud is like a grand white calla lily, beautiful, but devoid of sweetness and perfume."

"The lily is the most beautiful of all flowers," the girl answers, sighing.

"But the rose is the emblem of love," he replies, smiling as the swift color floods her cheeks.

She has no answer ready, and he goes on with some embarrassment:

"Do not try to be like Maud, Reine. Though so beautiful and stately, she was mercenary and treacherous. Perhaps a less perfect manner is preferable with a heart free from guile. Do you not think so?"

Before she can reply, Sir George Wilde comes up to them. His eyes rest admiringly on the beautiful, graceful, dark-eyed girl by the side of Vane Charteris.

"Sentimentalizing and reading poetry?" says the intruder, looking at Reine's book. "Upon my word it is simply shocking, the number of flirtations going on this evening. Miss Langton, let me see your verses," coolly taking the open volume from her hand.

Vane, looking off to sea, unreasonably vexed, and out of humor, hears him reading in a clear, full voice, the lines on which Reine's hands have been closely folded since he sat down by her.

"'We stand at the window watching,Oh, God! through the glass of time,For the sails of our hopes to blossomOut on life's horizon line."'And we see not across the islandsThe clouds that come up the sun,Until they have folded in silenceThe headlands one by one."'And the winds to each other callingOver the waters pass,And we say: "They are wrecked at dawning,The hopes of our lives, alas!"'"

"Lugubrious reading, certainly," comments the lively young baronet. "Does Charteris enjoy that style of poetry for a summer evening by the sea?"

"I—I was not reading to Mr. Charteris," the girl stammers, vaguely confused. "I was reading when he came, and then I laid the book down."

Both men regard her a little gravely.

The touch of sadness in face and voice is strange, yet sweet, in the young and lovely girl.

Sir George tells himself that there is some depth to this lovely American girl, and wonders why Charteris doesn't fall in love with her.

For himself, he is very far gone indeed, and Vane, irritated by his society, abruptly announces that he will go up and see Mr. Langton.

"He will be very pleased, I know," Reine answers, brightening suddenly, and Vane turns away with a sudden angry conviction that she is glad to have him gone.

Sir George is glad at least, there can be no two opinions as to that. He settles himself delightedly in Vane's vacated chair.

CHAPTER XVII

"I have a proposition to make to you," Vane says, after he has conversed with Mr. Langton awhile on indifferent subjects.

Mr. Langton, lying on his couch, looking dull and weary, glances up with some interest.

"Well?" he says, abruptly.

"I saw your physician to-day," Vane observes, slightly embarrassed. "He thinks it would be at the risk of your health if you left this place under a month."

"The rascal! He's keeping me here to swell his fee for attendance, that's all," groans the millionaire; "well, and what has that to do with your proposition, eh?"

"A great deal. You know your delay in returning to America is attended with serious risk to Maud Langton, languishing in prison, and waiting for a release that cannot come until she regains possession of that note that is to prove her innocence."

"I have urged Reine to return alone, but she is unwilling to leave me," Mr. Langton answers, hastily.

"There would be no risk in doing so," Vane replies, "with a competent nurse left in charge of you. It is of that I wished to speak to you. Persuade Reine to go back without you. I will myself accompany her."

"You!" Mr. Langton exclaims, in such thorough surprise, that Vane flushes a deep red.

"Yes," he answers, a little testily, "I will go with her. Why not? She is my wife."

"Certainly, and it will be a very good plan," Mr. Langton replies, secretly delighted at Vane's repentance, but pretending to be very calm and non-committal.

"You see," Vane continues, with a sigh of relief, "after the business that took us home was concluded, I should bring Reine back. By that time you would be well and strong again, and we would travel some, the three of us, and remain abroad some time. Do you like my plan?"

"Very much. I am pleased with the idea. Have you spoken with Reine on the subject?"

"No, not yet. To tell the truth I have relied on you to persuade her. I might fail, you know. Will you undertake to plead my case for me?" inquires Vane, blushing like a girl.

"I thought you were lawyer enough to plead your own case," laughs the old millionaire.

"You see, this is different," answers Vane. "I—I do not quite understand Reine. I do not know how she would receive such a proposal. Perhaps she would laugh at me. I should have to plead as a lover, not as a lawyer. Only imagine the spirited little lady laughing in my face."

"I do not believe it is likely," Mr. Langton replies. "But since you are so afraid of your wife, I will speak to her about the matter. But, pray tell me, is your anxiety solely over Maud, or are you reconciled to your strange marriage?"

A step at the door, a hand at the latch, and Reine comes in, interrupting the answer hovering on his lips. Vane rises abruptly.

"I will go down and smoke my segar on the balcony," he says, then, looking at his wife: "Reine, will you walk on the sand with me afterward? It will be moonlight, and the nights are very pleasant."

A smile of surprise and pleasure lights the changeful face into splendor.

"Thank you, I shall like it very much," she answers, with some inward wonder at his kindness.

"I will wait for you, then, on the balcony," he replies, and when he's gone, Mr. Langton hastens to tell her of Vane's proposal.

Her color comes and goes, her bosom heaves as she listens.

"But you know I could not leave you here alone with only a hired nurse," she remonstrates.

"You could, and you must," he replies, seriously.

"Listen, Reine, your husband has held out the olive-branch of peace, and you must not decline to accept it if you care for him. I shall do very well here with the doctor and the nurse. After all, I am not sick, only weak and fatigued. Remember Maud's peril before you refuse."

"I have written to Maud's lawyer. He will know that I have the note, and they will wait until I come," she replies.

"Delays are dangerous," he answers, "and the mails are not sure. Suppose your letter should not reach them. Letters have been lost before now," he says, artfully.

The girlish face grows white and troubled.

"If I thought that mine would be lost–" she begins.

"You would go," he finishes for her. "Very well, Reine, take my advice and go. I will remain here until you return. Go down now to your husband and tell him you will be ready to accompany him to-morrow."

"If anything should happen to you, I should never forgive myself," she says, with lingering hesitation.

"Nothing will happen," he answered. "You will find me here, when you come back, safe and well. Go, now, to Vane, and tell him you will go."

She lingers a moment, warned by some strange presentiment of evil; then, conquered by his renewed persuasions, and her own anxiety over Maud's fate, she goes from the room with a strangely beating heart to seek her husband.

He throws away his segar with a smile at sight of her, and comes out from a little knot of men who have clustered around him.

"You are ready?" he says, with a new tone of tenderness in his voice that makes the girlish heart beat all the faster, and drawing her hand through his arm they bend their steps to the shore.

It is twilight, that most seductive hour of all the twenty-four. The moon is rising softly, a few stars shine in the purple vault above, and mirror themselves in the laughing waves below.

The murmurous sound of the great deep is all that breaks the silence.

"Mr. Langton has told you, Reine," he says, looking down into the brilliant face that is "luminous, star-like, gem-like," in the soft, twilight haze.

"Yes," she answers, in a low voice, as if she scarcely cared to break the charmed silence brooding around them.

They walk slowly arm-in-arm along the sandy shore. Vane has drawn her hand very closely through his arm, and the tips of her velvet-soft fingers lie against his wrist, sending thrills of sweetness along every nerve. To him also "silence seemed best," so they stroll on quietly awhile. Reine lost to everything but the magic charm that lies in the presence of the man she loves, and Vane held in thrall also by some new feeling, whose power he is scarcely prepared to acknowledge.

He looks down at the young face that is strangely fair and tender in the mystic light, and wonders at his own blindness that he has never quite realized the charm of her beauty before. She has thrown some soft trifle of filmy lace over her waving dark hair, with soft ends knotted beneath the round, dimpled chin. Nothing could be more becoming. It frames the glowing face so delicately and so exquisitely, making her fairer than she knows. A strange, delicious thrill goes through Vane's heart as he remembers that this girl belongs to him—she is his wife.

"And she loves me," he says to himself, with the same wonder he had felt when that truth first flashed upon him. It flatters his manly vanity, cruelly hurt by Maud's treachery, to know that one true heart clings to him and loves him, though the woman he had loved had deceived him.

Suddenly her lips part with an anxious question:

"And you think it wise and prudent that I should go back to Maud leaving Uncle Langton here?"

"Yes," he answers, and there is a silence which she does not break.

"What do you think of the plan?" he asks.

"I hardly know," the girl answers, with some embarrassment.

"But you will do as I wish you—you will go back—in my care, Reine?"

"If you think it for the best," she answers very low.

"I do think so, otherwise I should not urge it. You need not be afraid to go with me, Reine. I will care for you with every tenderness—you are my wife, you know."

And, stooping over her, he lays his lips full and softly upon her own.

The shock of a great, new happiness tingles through the girl's sensitive frame. It is the first caress her unloving husband has ever offered her. With that impulsive kiss hope, which has almost died in her wounded heart, is born anew.

"You are my wife," he repeats, gently. "I shall not lose sight of that fact again. I shall remember my duty better."

She sighs a little. That word "duty" sounds so cold.

"I will try to make you happier," he continues; "I fear you have not been so light-hearted as you used to be since that night. Do you know those verses you were reading this evening sounded like a reproach to me?"

She glances up, inquiringly.

"The verses you shut your hands over when I came up to you," he explains. "The sad words ring in my head:

"'And we say: "They are wrecked at dawning.The hopes of our lives, alas!"'

"Did you think, my child, that they applied to your own case?"

"I was tempted to think so—can you blame me?" she says, with a gentle reproach in her voice.