CHAPTER XIII

The latent sense of being arbiter of a beautiful young woman's fate--which had been perhaps Victor Mercier's only sentiment in Joan's regard during their separation--developed, on that evening they met in the Regent's Park, into a certain passionate exultation in possessing her for his own, evidently against her wish. But when he felt convinced, from Paul Naz' innocent betrayal of society talk, that the girl who was legally his wife had a lover, and that already their names were coupled together, the smouldering resentment that her girlish passion for him was dead, burst into a fierce flame of absolute hatred.

He had enjoyed abandoning himself to the enjoyment of Vera's love with a double zest--because it was a secret revenge upon Joan. He had gone about after he had received Joan's letter postponing their next meeting, making subtle and refined plans for the long-drawn-out punishment of his "faithless wife," as he termed her. He told himself he was glad of a week's interlude. If he had seen her then, he might have betrayed his wrath and desire for revenge. His tactics were quite the opposite of that.

"First, I must compromise her," he decided. "I must have her actions now, at the actual moment, in my power--she must have been alone with me in such a way as to turn this noble lord who wants her against her, should he know of it! Yes--if she had refused to see me, she might have gone in for a divorce! But if I have her condonation for the past on my side, she will have no case--even if she would not have entirely damned herself with this cur of a lover!"

This accomplished--something tangible in the present to hold over her head--he would take her away and make constant and passionate love to her. He told himself grimly that there would be a fantastic delight in this uxorious enjoyment of a wife whose heart was given to another man, which fell to the lot of few. The secret ecstasy would be the knowledge that he had left the loving arms of a devoted girl who was ready to die for him, and could return to them at any moment--for he well knew that Vera's infatuation for him included wholesale acceptance of any lie he chose to invent to account for his absence, or any detail of his life.

"Then--I can play upon them all in turn, as upon a set of musical instruments," he promised himself. "The uncle will do what I ask--snob as he is, parvenu, beggar on horseback!--to hide what he will think disgrace! The lover--well, he shall be neatly disposed of by-and-bye. He shall see me with her in my arms, somehow, somewhere, somewhen! Upon my word, that will be almost as much torture to them both as the old-fashioned, out-of-date revenges. It is a poor revenge upon people to kill them! Let them live--and thwart them, make them writhe in their impotence to do what they want!"

And during this week Vera must be plunged more hopelessly and abjectly in love, so that she would become such a mere echo of himself that she would do, or not do, whatever he suggested, without so much as a second thought.

So he devoted himself to her, and spent his money freely in the process. He bought her pretty trinkets, and some ready-made costumes and becoming hats--and almost every day took her some excursion. They had a day at Brighton, one at Windsor, one in Richmond Park, one up river. That was the day before the one in which the crucial interview with Joan was to occur; and he chose to assume a portentous gravity, and to tell her that he must go away for a time.

"My sweetest pet, this being with you is pretty well driving me mad with impatience to get rid of that cat of a woman who keeps us apart," he told her, as, after they had had a little _fete champetre_ of cold chicken and champagne, he lounged at her side in a boat drawn up under the willows of a little creek. "So I have made up my mind to set about it at once! What do you say?"

"Dearest!" was all she could reply. Her beautiful blue eyes gazed at him through a mist of emotion. How deliriously dainty she looked--flickering shadows cast by the willow branches on her _petite_, white-clad figure--the heat of a mid-summer noon bringing a rich rose glow to her rounded cheeks, so much more delicately pretty without war-paint.

"It will necessitate my being absent for a little while, but that you must not mind," he went on, judicially, resting his head on her shoulder and thinking what a wonderful provision of Nature it was--this unbounded credulity of enamoured women. Did they really believe in their men, he wondered, a little contemptuously--or did their frantic desire for their love to be returned swallow up everything that stood in its way? "When one wants a good thing, one must be content to make a little sacrifice for it, eh, darling? I don't think you are as selfish as most of your sex, I will say that for you!"

She glanced at him gratefully. One word of praise from his lips recompensed her for all the drudgery, hard work, and mental suffering of the past years--when, not knowing where he was or what had become of him--whether he was dead or in prison, or fallen among thieves in some unreachable country--she had slaved and toiled nearly the four-and-twenty hours through to keep a home together in which, some day, to welcome back the wanderer, or even the total wreck of him.

"And now you must help me in something," he went on, sliding his arm about her slender waist and looking up into her face with those sinister, penetrating black eyes, which were, perhaps, the deterrent when dogs growled and snarled at, and children fled from, him. "I am not one of those silly men who talk about their business--who chatter, prate, prattle, and do nothing!--I say little--but act! (The secret of successful life, my dear!) I have not been idle since I returned with the hope of winning you for my wife. Already I have found out much of the woman who was my ruin for a time with her unscrupulous devilry, which will help me immensely to free myself from that obnoxious tie. But I have still to see a very important witness against her, and I can only see the man at my leisure at home. Do you think that if I appoint to-morrow night, you can persuade mother to go to the theatre with you?"

"Don't you know? She is going to the entertainment given for the patients at the Hospital," returned Vera, eagerly. "That will be the very thing for you! You will have the house to yourself. Mr. Dobson is going, of course!" (Mr. Dobson was a student lodger).

"Everything smiles upon us, my love," he said, tenderly, grimly congratulating himself on his good luck. And he gave himself up to love-making for the remainder of the summer afternoon--returning earlier than he had intended, though, to write that letter to Joan: the letter which Julie brought among others to her bedside, and which she read with blanched cheeks and sinking heart:--

"You must not go to the old place, but come to me here, to-morrow night, Wednesday, at nine. If you fail, I intend to call upon you without demur, and at all risk. Take a cab to the corner of Westminster Bridge, the other side of the river, and then inquire for Haythorn Street.

V. a'COURT."