CHAPTER III

ALICE'S MARRIAGE

It was after ten o'clock when he returned to Botetourt, and he found upon reaching home that Lydia had already gone to bed, though a bottle of cough syrup, placed conspicuously upon his bureau, bore mute witness to the continuance of her solicitude. After so marked a consideration it seemed to him only decent that he should swallow a portion of the liquid; and he was in the act of filling the tablespoon she had left, when a ring at the door caused him to start until the medicine spilled from his hand. A moment later the ring was repeated more violently, and as he was aware that the servants had already left the house, he threw on his coat, and lighting a candle, went hurriedly out into the hall and down the dark staircase. The sound of a hand beating on the panels of the door quickened his steps almost into a run, and he was hardly surprised, when he had withdrawn the bolts, to find Alice's face looking at him from the darkness outside. She was pale and thin, he saw at the first glance, and there was an angry look in her eyes, which appeared unnaturally large in their violent circles.

"I thought you would never open to me, papa," she said fretfully as she crossed the threshold. "Oh, I am so glad to see you again! Feel how cold my hands are, I am half frozen."

Taking her into his arms, he kissed her face passionately as it rested for an instant against his shoulder.

"Are you alone, Alice? Where is your husband?"

Without answering, she raised her head, shivering slightly, and then turning away, entered the library where a log fire was smouldering to ashes. As he threw on more wood, she came over to the hearth, and stretched out her hands to the warmth with a nervous gesture. Then the flame shot up and he saw that her beauty had gained rather than lost by the change in her features. She appeared taller, slenderer, more distinguished, and the vivid black and white of her colouring was intensified by the perfect simplicity of the light cloth gown and dark furs she wore.

"Oh, he's at home," she answered, breaking the long silence. "I mean he's in the house in Henry Street, but we had a quarrel an hour after we got back, so I put on my hat again and came away. I'm not going back--not unless he makes it bearable for me to live with him. He's such--such a brute that it's as much as one can do to put up with it, and it's been killing me by inches for the last months. I meant to write you about it, but somehow I couldn't, and yet I knew that I couldn't write at all without letting you see it. Oh, he's unbearable!" she exclaimed, with a tremor of disgust. "You will never know--you will never be able to imagine all that I've been through!"

"But is he unkind to you, Alice? Is he cruel?"

She bared her arm with a superb disdainful gesture, and he saw three rapidly discolouring bruises on her delicate flesh. The sight filled him with loathing rather than anger, and he caught her to him almost fiercely as if he would hold her not only against Geoffrey Heath, but against herself.

"You shall not go back to him," he said, "I will not permit it!"

"The worst part is," she went on vehemently, as if he had not spoken, "that it is about money--money--always money. He has millions, his lawyers told me so, and yet he makes me give an account to him of every penny that I spend. I married him because I thought I should be rich and free, but he's been hardly better than a miser since the day of the wedding. He wants me to dress like a dowdy, for all his wealth, and I can't buy a ring that he doesn't raise a terrible fuss. I hate him more and more every day I live, but it makes no difference to him as long as he has me around to look at whenever he pleases. I have to pay him back for every dollar that he gives me, and if I keep away from him and get cross, he holds back my allowance. Oh, it's a dog's life!" she exclaimed wildly, "and it is killing me!"

"You shan't bear it, Alice. As long as I'm alive you are safe with me."

"For a time I could endure it because of the travelling and the strange countries," she resumed, ignoring the tenderness in his voice, "but Geoffrey was so frightfully jealous that if I so much as spoke to a man, he immediately flew into a rage. He even made me leave the opera one night in Paris because a Russian Grand Duke in the next box looked at me so hard."

Throwing herself into a chair, she let her furs slip from her shoulders, and sat staring moodily into the fire. "I've sworn a hundred times that I'd leave him," she said, "and yet I've never done it until to-night."

While she talked on feverishly, he untied her veil, which she had tossed back, and taking off her hat, pressed her gently against the cushions he had placed in her chair.

"You look so tired, darling, you must rest," he said.

"Rest! You may as well tell me to sleep!" she exclaimed. Then her tone altered abruptly, and for the first time, she seemed able to penetrate beyond her own selfish absorption. "Oh, you poor papa, how very old you look!" she said.

Taking his head in her arms, she pressed it to her bosom and cried softly for a minute. "It's all my fault--everything is my fault, but I can't help it. I'm made that way." Then pushing him from her suddenly, she sprang to her feet and began walking up and down in her restless excited manner.

"Let me get you a glass of wine, Alice," he said, "you are trembling all over."

She shook her head. "It isn't that--it isn't that. It's the awful--awful money. If it wasn't for the money I could go on. Oh, I wish I'd never spent a single dollar! I wish I'd always gone in rags!"

Again he forced her back into her chair and again, after a minute of quiet, she rose to her feet and broke into hysterical sobs.

"All that I have is yours, Alice, you know that," he said in the effort to soothe her, "and, besides, your own property is hardly less than two hundred thousand."

"But Uncle Richard won't give it to me," she returned angrily. "I wrote and begged him on my knees and he still refused to let me have a penny more than my regular income. It's all tied up, he says, in investments, and that until I am twenty-one it must remain in his hands."

With a frantic movement, she reached for her muff, and drew from it a handful of crumpled papers, which she held out to him. "Geoffrey found these to-night and they brought on the quarrel," she said. "Yesterday he gave me this bracelet and he seems to think I could live on it for a month!" She stretched out her arm, as she spoke, and showed him a glittering circle of diamonds immediately below the blue finger marks. "There's a sable coat still that he doesn't know a thing of," she finished with a moan.

Bending under the lamp, he glanced hurriedly over the papers she had given him, and then rose to his feet still holding them in his hand.

"These alone come to twenty thousand dollars, Alice," he said with a gentle sternness.

"And there are others, too," she cried, making no effort to control her convulsive sobs. "There are others which I didn't dare even to let him see."

For a moment he let her weep without seeking to arrest her tears.

"Are you sure this will be a lesson to you?" he asked at last. "Will you be careful--very careful from this time?"

"Oh, I'll never spend a penny again. I'll stay in Botetourt forever," she promised desperately, eager to retrieve the immediate instant by the pledge of a more or less uncertain future.

"Then we must help you," he said. "Among us all--Uncle Richard, your mother and I--it will surely be possible."

Pacified at once by his assurance, she sat down again and dried her eyes in her muff.

"It seems a thousand years since I went away," she observed, glancing about her for the first time. "Nothing is changed and yet everything appears to be different."

"And are you different also?" he asked.

"Oh, I'm older and I've seen a great deal more," she responded, with a laugh which came almost as a shock to him after her recent tears, "but I still want to go everywhere and have everything just as I used to."

"But I thought you were determined to stay in Botetourt for the future?" he suggested.

"Well, so I am, I suppose," she returned dismally, "there's nothing else for me to do, is there?"

"Nothing that I see."

"Then I may as well make up my mind to be miserable forever. It's so frightfully gloomy in this old house, isn't it? How is mamma?"

"She's just as you left her, neither very well nor very sick."

"So it's exactly what it always was, I suppose, and will drive me to distraction in a few weeks. Is Dick away?"

"He's at college, and he's doing finely."

"Of course he is--that's why he's such a bore."

"Let Dick alone, Alice, and tell me about yourself. So you went to Europe immediately after I saw you in Washington?"

"Two days later. I was dreadfully seasick, and Geoffrey was as disagreeable as he could be, and made all kinds of horrid jokes about me."

"You went straight to Paris, didn't you?"

"As soon as we landed, but Geoffrey made me come away in three weeks because he said I spent so much money." Her face clouded again at the recollection of her embarrassments. "Oh, we had awful scenes, but I hadn't even a wedding dress, you know, and French dressmakers are so frightfully expensive. One of them charged me five thousand dollars for a gown--but he told me that it was really cheap, because he'd sold one to another American the day before for twelve thousand. I don't know who her husband is," she added wistfully, "but I wish I were married to him."

The wildness of her extravagance depressed him even more than her excessive despair had done; and he wondered if the vagueness of her ideas of wealth was due to the utter lack in her of the imagination which foresees results? She had lived since her girlhood in a quiet Virginia town, her surroundings had been comparatively simple, and she had never been thrown, until her marriage, amid the corrupting influences of great wealth, yet, in spite of these things, she had squandered a fortune as carelessly as a child might have strewed pebbles upon the beach. Her regret at last had come not through realisation of her fault, but in the face of the immediate punishment which threatened her.

"So he got you out of Paris? Well, I'm glad of that," he remarked.

"He was perfectly brutal about it, I wish you could have heard him. Then we went down into Italy and did nothing for months but look at old pictures--at least I did, he wouldn't come--and float around in a gondola until I almost died from the monotony. It was only after I found a lace shop, where they had the most beautiful things, that he would take me away, and then he insisted upon going to some little place up in the Alps because he said he didn't suppose I could possibly pack the mountains into my trunks. Oh, those dreadful mountains! They were so glaring I could never go out of doors until the afternoon, and Geoffrey would go off climbing or shooting and leave me alone in a horrid little hotel where there was nobody but a one-eyed German army officer, and a woman missionary who was bracing herself for South Africa. She wore a knitted jersey all day and a collar which looked as if it would cut her head off if she ever forgot herself and bent her neck." Her laughter, the delicious, irresponsible laughter of a child, rippled out: "She asked me one day if our blacks wore draperies? The ones in South Africa didn't, and it made it very embarrassing sometimes, she said, to missionary to them. Oh, you can't imagine what I suffered from her, and Geoffrey was so horrid about it, and insisted that she was just the sort of companion that I needed. So one day when he happened to be in the writing-room where she was, I locked the door on the outside and threw the key down into the gorge. There wasn't any locksmith nearer than twenty miles, and when they sent for him he was away. Oh, it was simply too funny for words! Geoffrey on the inside was trying to break the heavy lock and the proprietor on the outside was protesting that he mustn't, and all the time we could hear the missionary begging everybody please to be patient. She said if it were required of her she was quite prepared to stay locked up all night, but Geoffrey wasn't, so he swung himself down by the branches of a tree which grew near the window."

All her old fascination had come back to her with her change of mood, and he forgot to listen to her words while he watched the merriment sparkle in her deep blue eyes. It was a part of his destiny that he should submit to her spell, as, he supposed, even Geoffrey submitted at times.

He was about to make some vague comment upon her story, when her face changed abruptly into an affected gravity, and turning his head, he saw that Lydia had come noiselessly into the room, and was advancing to meet her daughter with outstretched arms.

"Why, Alice, my child, what a beautiful surprise! When did you come?"

As Alice started forward to her embrace, Ordway noticed that there was an almost imperceptible tightening of the muscles of her body.

"Only a few minutes ago," she replied, with the characteristic disregard of time which seemed, in some way, to belong to her inability to consider figures, "and, oh, I am so glad to be back! You are just as lovely as ever."

"Well, you are lovelier," said Lydia, kissing her, and adding a moment afterward, as the result of her quick, woman's glance, "what a charming gown!"

Alice shrugged her shoulders, with a foreign gesture which she had picked up. "Oh, you must see some of my others," she replied, "I wish that my trunks would come, but I forgot they were all sent to the other house, and I haven't even a nightgown. Will you lend me a nightgown, mamma? I have some of the loveliest you ever saw which were embroidered for me by the nuns in a French convent."

"So, you'll spend the night?" said Lydia, "I'm so glad, dear, and I'll go up and see if your bed has sheets on it."

"Oh, it's not only for the night," returned Alice, defiantly, "I've come back for good. I've left Geoffrey, haven't I, papa?"

"I hope so, darling," answered Ordway, coming for the first time over to where they stood.

"Left Geoffrey?" repeated Lydia. "Do you mean you've separated?"

"I mean I'm never going back again--that I detest him--that I'd rather die--that I'll kill myself before I'll do it."

Lydia received her violence with the usual resigned sweetness that she presented to an impending crisis.

"But, my dear, my dear, a divorce is a horrible thing!" she wailed.

"Well, it isn't half so horrible as Geoffrey," retorted Alice.

Ordway, who had turned away again as Lydia spoke, came forward at the girl's angry words, and caught the hand that she had stretched out as if to push her mother from her.

"Let's be humbly grateful that we've got her back," he said, smiling, "while we prepare her bed."