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Christina

<h3> CHAPTER III. </h3> <h4> "ONE OF THE BEST THINGS LEFT." </h4> The chambers in Jermyn Street occupied by Rupert Mernside, had a character which seemed to reflect their owner. Perhaps all rooms in a more or less degree are reflections of those who live in them: human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously, stamp their personalities upon their surroundings, and create their distinctive atmospheres, even in hired lodgings. Rupert's rooms, filled as they were with the furniture he had from time to time picked up, the walls hung with pictures his fastidious taste had chosen, the bookcases filled with his own special collection of books, were, to those with eyes to see, a mirror of their master's nature. Simplicity was the keynote of the whole. There were no expensive hangings, no luxurious rugs or heavily upholstered chairs and couches; there was nothing of what Mernside himself would have described as "frippery," nothing effeminate or over-dainty. Matting, with here and there a soft-coloured rug, covered the floor of the sitting-room; the walls, tinted a pale apricot yellow, were hung with water-colour sketches, each one of which bore the mark of a master hand; the bookcases were of carved oak, as were the one or two tables, whilst the chairs, of a severely simple pattern, and even the few armchairs, spoke rather of solid comfort, than of any undue luxury. Upon the breakfast table, pushed near the window, stood a bowl of chrysanthemums, touched into jewelled beauty by a faint ray of November sunlight. Seeing the sunlight on the rich coloured blossoms, Rupert smiled, as he entered the sitting-room a week after his return from Bramwell Castle. It was not his habit to fill his rooms with flowers: he had a fancy that such a custom savoured of womanishness; but Cicely, his pretty little cousin, had rifled the greenhouse for him with her own hands, and Cicely's fashion of giving would have made even a dandelion a charming and acceptable gift. Mernside was early that morning, and he had seated himself in front of the silver coffee-pot and covered dishes, before Courtfield, his irreproachable servant, brought in the letters. "Good Lord, man!" his master exclaimed, as the salver was handed to him, "those letters can't possibly all be for me," and he eyed the huge pile with the disfavour of one who regards a letter merely as a rather tiresome piece of business, which must perforce be answered. "Well, sir, I should gather they were all for you," Courtfield answered respectfully, whilst his master gathered the packet of envelopes into his two hands. "I thought myself at first that there must be some mistake, seeing that they are only addressed in initials. But the number is correct, sir." "By Jove!" Mernside exclaimed, gazing with stupefied eyes at the unprecedented batch of correspondence, and observing that every letter bore the initials only, "R.M.," and had been forwarded to him from a newspaper office. Courtfield noiselessly left the room, but his master's coffee remained in the pot, and his breakfast untasted, whilst he sat and stared with a petrified stare at the pile of unopened letters, with their extraordinarily unfamiliar address. A dusky flush mounted to his forehead, and he turned over one of the letters distastefully, as though its very touch were odious to him. "I am not in the habit of being addressed by initials only," he muttered, "nor of corresponding through newspapers; the wretched things are probably not meant for me at all—unless it's some confounded hoax," he added, after a pause, at the same moment tearing open the top letter of the pile, one addressed in an untidy, uneducated handwriting. "Good heavens!" he exclaimed, pushing back his chair, and staring down at the letter he unfolded, with the disgusted stare of one who sees something unexpectedly horrible, "is the woman mad? or am I mad?—or—what does it mean?" His eyes travelled quickly down the written page, the large, sprawling writing imprinting itself upon his brain. "DEAR SIR" (so the epistle ran),— "Having seen your advertisement in yesterday's Sunday Recorder, I beg to say that I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with you—with a view to meeting, etc. Am twenty-one, tall, and said to be elegant. Some call me pretty. Have large blue eyes, fair hair, and a good complexion. Am domesticated and sweet-tempered. Would send photograph if desired. "Yours truly, ROSALIE." "PS.—Should be pleased to cheer your loneliness." Mernside read this effusion to the end; then one word only, and that a forcible one, broke from his lips, and with grimly-set mouth, and eyes grown suddenly steely, he began to open and read one after another of the other letters, his expression becoming sterner and more grim as he laid each one down in turn. "My opinion of women is not enhanced by my morning's correspondence," he reflected cynically, during the course of his reading; "could one have believed there were so many silly women in the world—or so many plain ones?" and with a short laugh he picked up two photographs, and looked with scornful scrutiny at the wholly unattractive features of the ladies of uncertain age, and quite certain lack of beauty. Before he had waded half through the packet of letters, his table was strewn with his correspondence, and the look on his face was one, which, as his best friends would have known, indicated no amiable frame of mind. "Domesticated." "Would make a lonely man intensely happy." "Only long for a quiet home such as you suggest." "Such as I suggest—I!" Mernside looked wildly round him. "Do I appear to be in search of a quiet home?" he exclaimed, apostrophising the pictures on the walls; "do I want a domesticated female? 'Am considered pretty'—oh, are you, my good young woman? You can't write a civilised letter, that's certain. 'I have a slender income of my own—amply sufficient for my modest wants—but I gather you do not require a fortune with the lady—only a companion for your loneliness.' "A fortune with the lady? I don't require the lady, thank you," Rupert soliloquised, picking, out sentences from the letters as he read them, and flung them one by one upon the pile. "'I have been lonely for so long myself, that I can fully understand what a lonely man feels. I am no longer in my first youth, but I have a heart overflowing with tenderness. Your happiness would be my first, my only care, etc., etc.' "Pshaw—what tommy rot! "'All my friends say I am cheerful. I have often been called a little ray of sunshine'"—Rupert lay back in his chair, and shouted with sudden laughter. "'I would make your home a heaven of bliss.'" "Oh! Good lord! Good lord!" quoth the unhappy reader, "who in heaven's name has played this confounded practical joke upon me? And what am I to do with these abominable letters and photographs? I should like to burn the lot!—but oh! hang it all, the silly women have taken some rotten hoax for earnest, and"—he paused, as though struck by a sudden recollection, then bounced out of his chair with a good round expletive. "That young ass, Jack Layton! I'll take my oath he was at the bottom of this tomfoolery. Wasn't he reading some matrimonial humbug out of—wait!—by Jove! it was the Sunday Recorder," and without more ado, Mernside strode across the room and rang the bell. "Get me a copy of the Sunday Recorder of the day before yesterday, at once," he said curtly, when Courtfield appeared. As soon as the man had vanished, he returned to the table, gathered up the letters he had read, and thrust them into the bureau near the fireplace; and by the time Courtfield came back with the paper in his hand, his master was decorously eating a poached egg, and deliberately opening the nineteenth or twentieth letter of his morning mail. There was little deliberation in his movements when, alone once more, he feverishly turned the pages of the Sunday Recorder, until his eyes fell on the words, "Matrimonial Bureau." Yes—there it was. The wretched thing seemed to leap into sight as though it were alive, and to his disordered vision the lines appeared to be twice the size of the ordinary print. "Quiet and cultivated gentleman of means, who is very lonely, is anxious to meet a young lady of good birth who needs a home. No fortune is necessary, but marriage may be agreed upon, if both parties are mutually satisfied." "Oh! may it indeed?" Mernside said scathingly, flinging the paper upon the floor. "A young lady of good birth!" His thoughts went back to the letters he had just been perusing, most of them ill-written, many mis-spelt, some genteel, some sentimental—but all bearing the unmistakable stamp of having been penned by the underbred and the vulgar. "A young lady of good birth." Again he reflected grimly, continuing to eat his breakfast, and to open letter after letter mechanically, expending over their contents a force of language which would greatly have surprised the writers, could they have heard it. "Not one of these good women has the most elementary conception what the word 'lady' means. No lady would be likely to answer such an advertisement," his thoughts continued contemptuously, as he picked up the last letter of the pile, and glanced idly at the writing of the address. That writing held his attention; it was different from the others; yes, it was certainly different. It did not sprawl; it was not exaggerated or affected; it was merely a round, simple, girlish hand, with unmistakable character in the well-formed letters and clean strokes. And when he had drawn out the contents of the envelope, and read them slowly, some of the grim lines about his mouth faded away, a softer look came into his eyes. "This is different," he said, "very different," and for the second time he read the terse phrases. "c/o Mrs. Cole, Newsagent,     "100, Cartney Street, S.W. "DEAR SIR,— "I should not have answered your advertisement, but that I cannot find work. I need a home very much. If I could make things better for somebody else who is lonely, I should be very pleased. I am not at all pretty or clever, but I can cook a little, and I can sew. "Yours truly, C.M. "I am twenty." "Poor little girl," Rupert murmured, "if this is genuine, I am sorry for C.M. She is the only one of the lot who writes like a lady, and the only one who does not suggest a meeting, or actually appoint a meeting place. Those are points in her favour. But, had I ever any intention of marrying, I should not make my matrimonial arrangements through the medium of a newspaper!" Each writer of the letters which had so disturbed Mernside at breakfast time, received a few hours later a short note, and the wording of all the notes was identical. "DEAR MADAM,— "I regret that both you and I should have been the victims of a hoax. The advertisement in the Sunday Recorder was inserted without my knowledge or consent. Regretting any annoyance this may cause you. "Yours faithfully, R.M." But when, having laboured through the mass of "Rosalies," "Violets," "Lilians," and "Hildas," he finally reached the little note signed "C.M.," Mernside paused. "I—don't think I can let this little girl know she has been the victim of a hoax," he mused, a pitiful tenderness creeping about his heart as he thought of the girl who was without work or home; "the others are fairly tough-skinned, I am ready to swear. This one"—he looked again at the round, characteristic handwriting, the simple phrases—"this one—did not make up her mind to write such a letter, excepting under stress of circumstances, I am sure of that. This one—is different. And if that incorrigible young ass, Jack Layton, hadn't started on a yachting cruise last week, I—should jolly well like to give him a thrashing." Feeling the need, as he himself expressed it, of a balloon full of fresh air after his distasteful occupation of the morning, Rupert went out at about eleven o'clock, taking with him the pile of letters he had to post. "Can't leave them for Courtfield's inquisitive eyes," he muttered. "Good chap as he is, Courtfield would think I had gone raving mad, if he saw all these things addressed to Christian names and initials. I'll get rid of the horrors, and then see if Margaret can take the taste of them away from me." The letters posted, he made his way briskly along Piccadilly, and across the Park, to a quiet road in Bayswater, where he stopped before a small detached house, standing a little back from the pavement, in its own garden. His ring at the bell brought to the door a middle-aged servant, whose plain but kindly face expanded into a smile when she saw him. He was evidently a frequent and welcome visitor, for to his cheery "Well, Elizabeth, how are things this morning?" she answered with another smile— "We've had a bad two days, sir, but Mrs. Stanforth is better now. She is downstairs, sir," and, opening a door on the right of the tiny hall, she ushered Rupert into a long narrow room, whose windows at either end gave it an unusual look of brightness and sunshine. A piano took up a large share of one wall, and over the piano hung some fine photographs of Old Masters, chiefly of the Italian school. The fireplace was flanked by bookshelves, and drawn close to one of these was a couch, on which lay a woman of such rare and startling beauty, that Mernside, familiar as her face was to him, caught his breath as he entered, and for a moment stood still, looking silently down at her. Her cheeks were very white, but it was the whiteness of a pure white rose, and gave one no sense of ill-health, although there was about her a certain air of fragility. Her hair, soft and dark, waved back from her forehead in dusky masses, that made just the right background for her exquisitely chiselled features, and for the eyes, that seemed to concentrate in themselves all the loveliness of her face. They were wonderful eyes—dark, deep, unfathomable—with a mystery in their depths that enhanced their strange fascination. Those dark eyes with their sweeping lashes, and the crimson line of her beautiful mouth, were the only points of colour in her face, and as she turned her head to greet the visitor, the gleam of light that shot into those eyes, might well have turned a stronger head than Rupert's. Meeting her glance, his pulses quickened, and his own eyes grew bright; but his voice was very quiet, very self-contained, as he said— "I am three days too soon—I know it, you need not tell me. But—I had to come to-day." She put one of her hands into his, but she did not move from her prostrate position on the couch, and her visitor seated himself on a low chair by her side, whilst she gently withdrew the hand he still held, and said softly— "Why especially to-day? You must not break through the stipulation, Rupert. If there is a particular reason now—I—will forgive you—but—we must keep to our bargain." Gentle as was the voice, gentle as was the look in her eyes, a look of almost maternal tenderness, there was evidence that behind the tenderness, lay a most unusual strength of character. The woman with the beautiful face, although she lay prone upon a sofa, and was obviously an invalid, showed in her personality no trace of weakness. Her eyes met the eyes of her visitor squarely and straightly, there was almost a hint of severity in the set of her lips. "Why did you come to-day?" she repeated, when he stirred uneasily in his chair, and kicked away a footstool in front of him, with a touch of irritability. "When I begin to put it into words, it sounds a babyish reason; but that jackanapes, Layton, has been playing an idiotic practical joke upon me, and I—was fool enough to mind it. I wanted soothing down; and—I wanted your advice about a girl." "About—a girl—you!" A note of excitement was apparent in her accents; she looked at him narrowly. "Has it—come—at last, Rupert?" she questioned, and her quiet voice shook just a little. "No—no—my God—no!" he exclaimed, "nothing of that sort is ever likely to come into my life—again"—he uttered the last words under his breath, and his eyes rested hungrily on her beautiful face—"there is no question of—my caring for any girl—only—young Jack Layton has made me responsible for what may make a perfectly innocent girl unhappy." And forthwith he plunged into a full description of the sheaf of letters received that morning, winding up with a mention of the terse little letter signed "C.M." His listener's eyes twinkled mischievously as he told the first part of his story in wrathful accents, and over some of his quotations from the letters that had reached him she laughed—a frank, delicious laugh that seemed oddly out of keeping with the tragic mystery of her eyes. But as he described that last letter, with its simple wording, her face grew grave again, and when his voice ceased, she uttered the precise words that had fallen from his own lips three hours earlier. "Poor little girl—oh! poor little girl!" "I am sorry for her," Mernside said impetuously, "and it doesn't seem fair that she should perhaps suffer for that idiotic young fool's love of practical jokes. Goodness knows what hopes she may have built upon this letter, and upon me. Of course, I can't give her a home, and I don't want to meet her—with a view to—anything. There is no place in my life for women, even as friends. There is no place in my life for more than—one woman," he ended vehemently. "Hush!" she said softly. "Remember—you promised; and—if you break your promise, I can't ever let you come here again." "I know—I know!" he cried, with an impetuosity very foreign to his usual self-control; "but, Margaret, is it to be like this always? Will a time never come when you—when I——" She put out her hand and laid it over one of his, with a firm touch that had a curiously quieting effect upon him. "You and I are great friends, as we have been for—longer than we care to think. But—there could not ever be an idea between us of anything else, not even the thought of such a thing. It is out of the question. It always has been out of the question. You know that as well as I do, and you must not come here at all, unless you can keep to our agreement in spirit as well as in letter." "Is our friendship nothing to you?" he asked sullenly. "It is—so much to me—that I will not risk spoiling it for ever," she said firmly; "but if you talk as you are talking now, I shall tell Elizabeth I cannot see you." "And you are putting up this fence between us, when—I might be some comfort to you," he exclaimed, almost roughly, getting up as he spoke to lean against the mantelpiece, and glower threateningly down at her, "when every reasonable being would tell you that he——" "Ah! hush!" she cried, and the sudden sharp anguish in her tones gave him pause; "don't let us go into it all over again. Whilst I feel—as I do feel—I must go on in the way I have marked out for myself, one can only follow the right as one sees it. Besides which——" "Besides which—his little finger is more to you than——" "Ah! don't—don't!" she interrupted him again, her eyes darkening and deepening with agony. "Rupert, I can't bear it; there are some things I am not strong enough to bear." "I was a brute," he said, his rough tone changing all at once into caressing tenderness; "I let myself go—I was an utter brute. Forgive me, dear—and—try to forget." He sat down beside her again, and his face, which had shown the same strong emotion that had rang in his words, resumed its quiet look of strength. A great relief swept over the woman's beautiful features, but she was shivering from head to foot, and in her eyes there still lay a haunting anguish. With an effort—how great an effort only she herself knew—she regained her self-control, and her voice, though still shaken, was very gentle again. "Tell me now about the poor little girl, and the matrimonial letter. Can we put our heads together to devise any way of helping her?" "I might conceivably get her some work," Rupert answered, "but people are a little chary of engaging employees recommended by bachelors like myself. Cicely might help her, but, first of all, I must find out if she is genuine. I couldn't impose a stranger, even on Cicely, good-natured, easy-going little soul that she is. And to find out anything about this girl will entail—meeting her!" Margaret Stanforth smiled. "Poor Rupert!" "I am not by way of making rendezvous with young women," he said with sarcasm; "it is not a pastime in which I have ever indulged. At the same time, I don't want to let a fellow creature go empty away, if I could really help her." "How would it be if you suggested her coming here? I could see her too, and—two heads being better than one—we might be able to do something really helpful. If the letter is sincere, it is obvious the girl is not a mere husband hunter; she is at her wits' end, and—I can't bear to think of any girl stranded in this great hungry London. I myself"—she pulled herself up short, leaving her sentence unfinished, then went on more quietly: "Write to C.M. and appoint a meeting here. Say this is the house of a lady of your acquaintance, ask her to come and see me—and incidentally to see you." "It is like you to make such a suggestion about a total stranger," Rupert exclaimed, "but—she may turn out an entire fraud—an arrant adventuress—and I could not be responsible for bringing such a person here." "Such a person! My dear Rupert, even if she were all the terrible things you describe, I don't think she could hurt me. I have seen—so much of the seamy side of life." For a moment Rupert looked at her silently. Long as he had known her, Margaret Stanforth was still largely an enigma to him, and it often seemed to him that the mysterious depths of her eyes veiled mysteries of her life which he had never fathomed. "For my own sake, for this girl's sake, I should like to jump at your offer," he said, after that long, searching look into her face, "but——" "There is no 'but,'" she put in gaily, a sudden smile momentarily chasing away the sadness of her face. "Write a civil, non-committal letter to C.M., and ask her, as I say, to come here. Surely, between us, we can do something for this poor little waif and stray. Why not fix to-morrow afternoon, at five o'clock? If the poor girl's need is urgent, we ought not to delay." "And—you forgive me for all I ought not to have said this morning," Rupert said when, ten minutes later, he rose to depart. "I—have not hurt you?" "No, you have not hurt me; but in future, you will remember—our bargain? And there are some things—I can't bear." Rupert Mernside walked slowly away from the house, his brain and heart full of the woman he had just left, who, after his departure, lay back amongst the silken cushions on her sofa, with a look of profound exhaustion. "There now, my dearie, you didn't ought to let him come and tire you this way; you get worn out with him coming worrying." The faithful Elizabeth had entered the room with a salver in her hand, and stood looking into her mistress's white face, with distress written all over her plain kindly features. Margaret opened her eyes, and smiled up into the loving ones fixed upon her. "No, he doesn't worry me; he is—a comfort, he helps me. Don't scold, nursie dear; his friendship is one of the best things I have in life—one of the best things I have left out of all the wreckage; but to-day—he brought back some of the old memories, and—I—am so silly still. They hurt; sometimes it all feels—unbearable." The ring of almost uncontrollable pain in her voice, brought a spasm of answering pain into the other's face, and she laid a work-roughened hand tenderly upon the dusky head against the cushions. "There, my dearie, there—there," she murmured, speaking as if her beautiful, stately mistress were a little child; "there's nothing so hard in this world but what it can be borne, if we look at it in the right way. The strength comes along with the sorrow, and 'tis all for the best." "Is it?" Into the dark eyes there flashed for a second a look of bitterness, and then Margaret drew the other woman's hand down to her lips, and kissed it. "I wish I had your simple straightforward faith, dear old nurse of mine," she said wearily; "you are so sure things will come right, and that what hurts us is for our good. And I—I can't say, 'Thy will be done'; at least, I can't say it as if I meant it. But what did you bring in on that salver?" she asked, after a moment of silence, and with an effort at brightness. "There, my pretty; I nearly forgot it after all. It came when I was speaking to the butcher on the doorstep, and Mr. Mernside was here, so I waited to bring it in till he was gone." She had a purpose in lengthening her story, and chatting on garrulously whilst Margaret opened the orange envelope, for the faithful creature had seen the sudden dilation of her mistress's dark eyes, the whitening of her lips; had seen, too, how her hands shook as they unfolded the telegram. "I don't understand it," Mrs. Stanforth whispered shakily, when her eyes had scanned the few words before her. "I don't know what it means—Elizabeth—but—I must go—I must go—at once." The servant drew the flimsy paper from her trembling hands and read the message, shaking her head in bewilderment, as the sense of it penetrated to her brain. "I'm sure I don't know what it means no more than you do, dearie," she said. "Graystone. "Come at once; prepare for surprise. "MARION." <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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