Run to Earth - Mary Elizabeth Braddon (classic reads .TXT) 📗

after day.

One day he came home with a very gloomy face, and when she uttered the usual question, he answered her in his gloomiest tone.

"I've heard something you'll scarcely care to learn," he said, "as it must sound the death-knell of all your hopes in that quarter. You know, Douglas Dale is a member of the Phoenix, as well as the Forum. I don't belong to the Phoenix, as you also know, but I meet Dale occasionally at the Forum. Yesterday I lunched with Lord Caversham, a member of the Phoenix, and an acquaintance of Dale's; and from him I learned that Douglas Dale has publicly announced his intended marriage with Paulina Durski."

"Impossible!" exclaimed Lydia.

She had heard of Paulina and the villa at Fulham from her brother, and she hated the lovely Austrian for the beauty and the fascination which won her a kind of renown amongst the fops and lordlings--the idlers and spendthrifts of the fashionable clubs.

"It cannot be true," cried Miss Graham, flushing crimson with anger. "It is one of Lord Caversham's absurd stories; and I dare say is without the slightest foundation. I cannot and will not believe that Douglas Dale would throw himself away upon such a woman as this Madame Durski."

"You have never seen her?"

"Of course not."

"Then don't speak so very confidently," said Captain Graham, who was malicious enough to take some pleasure in his sister's discomfiture. "Paulina Durski is one of the handsomest women I ever saw; not above five-and-twenty years of age--elegant, fascinating, patrician--a woman for whose sake a wiser man than Douglas Dale might be willing to sacrifice himself."

"I will see Mr. Dale," exclaimed Lydia. "I will ascertain from his own lips whether there is any foundation for this report."

"How will you contrive to see him?" "You must arrange that for me. You can invite him to dinner."

"I can invite him; but the question is whether he will come. Perhaps, if you were to write him a note, he would be more flattered than by any verbal invitation from me."

Lydia was not slow to take this hint. She wrote one of those charming and flattering epistles which an artful and self-seeking woman of the world so well knows how to pen. She expressed her surprise and regret at not having seen Mr. Dale since her return to town--her fear that he might be ill, her hope that he would accept an invitation to a friendly dinner with herself and her brother, who was also most anxious about him.

She was not destined to disappointment. On the following day she received a brief note from Mr. Dale, accepting her invitation for the next evening.

The note was very stiffly--nay, almost coldly worded; but Lydia attributed the apparent lack of warmth to the reserved nature of Douglas Dale, rather than to any failure of her own scheme.

The fact that he accepted her invitation at all, she considered a proof of the falsehood of the report about his intended marriage, and a good omen for herself.

She took care to provide a _recherché_ little dinner for her important guest, low as the finances of herself and her brother were--and were likely to be for some time to come. She invited a dashing widow, who was her obliging friend and neighbour, and who was quite ready to play propriety for the occasion. Lydia Graham looked her handsomest when Douglas Dale was ushered into her presence that evening; but she little knew how indifferent were the eyes that contemplated her bold, dark beauty; and how, even as he looked at her, Douglas Dale's thoughts wandered to the fair, pale face of Paulina Durski--that face, which for him was the loveliest that had ever beamed with light and beauty below the stars.

The dinner was to all appearance a success. Nothing could be more cordial or friendly, as it seemed, than that party of four, seated at a prettily decorated circular table, attended by a well-trained man- servant--the dashing widow's butler and factotum, borrowed for the occasion.

Mrs. Marmaduke, the dashing widow, made herself very agreeable, and took care to engage Captain Graham in conversation all the evening, leaving Lydia free to occupy the entire attention of Douglas Dale.

That young lady made excellent use of her time. Day by day her chances of a rich marriage had grown less and less, and day by day she had grown more and more anxious to secure a position and a home. She had a very poor opinion of Mr. Dale's intellect, for she believed only in the cleverness of those bolder and more obtrusive men who make themselves prominent in every assembly. She thought him a man easily to be beguiled by honeyed words and bewitching glances, and she had, therefore, determined to play a bold, if not a desperate game. While Mrs. Marmaduke and Captain Graham were talking in the front drawing- room, Lydia contrived to detain her guest in the inner apartment--a tiny chamber, just large enough to hold a small cottage piano, a stand of music-books, and a couple of chairs.

Miss Graham seated herself at the piano, and played a few bars with an absent and somewhat pensive air.

"That is a mournful melody," said Douglas. "I don't think I ever heard it before."

"Indeed!" murmured Lydia; "and yet I think it is very generally known. The air is pretty, is it not? But the words are ultra-sentimental."

And then she began to sing softly--


"I do not ask to offer thee
A timid love like mine;
I lay it, as the rose is laid,
On some immortal shrine."


"I think the words are rather pretty," said Douglas.

"Do you?" murmured Miss Graham; and then she stopped suddenly, looking downward, with one of those conscious blushes which were always at her command.

There was a pause. Douglas Dale stood by the music-stand, listlessly turning over a volume of songs.

Lydia was the first to break the silence.

"Why did you not come to see us sooner, Mr. Dale?" she asked. "You promised me you would come."

"I have been too much engaged to come," answered Douglas.

This reply sounded almost rude; but to Lydia this unpolished manner seemed only the result of extreme shyness, and, indeed, embarrassment, which to her appeared proof positive of her intended victim's enthralment.

Her eyes grew bright with a glance of triumph.

"I shall win," she thought to herself; "I shall win."

"Have you really wished to see me?" asked Douglas, after another pause.

"I did indeed wish to see you," she murmured, in tremulous tones.

"Indeed!" said Douglas, in a tone that might mean astonishment, delight, or anything else. "Well, Miss Graham, that was very kind of you. I go out very little, and never except to the houses of intimate friends."

"Surely you number us--my brother, I mean--among that privileged class," said Lydia, once more blushing bewitchingly.

"I do, indeed," said Douglas Dale, in a candid, kind, unembarrassed tone, which, if she had been a little less under the dominion of that proverbially blinding quality, vanity, would have been the most discouraging of all possible tones, to the schemes which she had formed; "I never forget how high you stood in my poor brother's esteem, Miss Graham; indeed, if you will pardon my saying so, I thought there was a much warmer feeling than that, on his part."

Lydia hardly knew how to take this observation. In one sense it was flattering, in another discouraging. If the belief brought Douglas Dale into easier relations with her, if it induced him to feel that a bond of friendship, cemented by the memory of the past, subsisted between them, so much the better for her purpose; but if he believed that this supposed love of Lionel's had been returned, and proposed to cultivate her on the mutual sympathy, or "weep with thee, tear for tear," principle, so much the worse. The position was undeniably embarrassing even to a young lady of Miss Lydia Graham's remarkable strength of mind, and _savoir faire_. But she extricated herself from it, without speaking, by some wonderful management of her eyes, and a slight deprecatory movement of her shoulders, which made even Douglas Dale, a by no means ready man, though endowed with deep feelings and strong common sense, understand, as well as if she had spoken, that Lionel had indeed entertained feelings of a tender nature towards her, but that she had not returned them by any warmer sentiment than friendship. It was admirably well done; and the next sentence which Douglas Dale spoke was certainly calculated to nourish Lydia's hopes.

"He might have sustained a terrible grief, then, had he lived longer," said Douglas; "but I see this subject pains you, Miss Graham; I will touch upon it no more. But perhaps you will allow the recollection of what we must both believe to have been his feelings and his hopes, to plead with you for me."

"For you, Mr. Dale!" and Lydia Graham's breast heaved with genuine emotion, and her voice trembled with no artificial faltering.

"Yes, Miss Graham, for me. I need a friend, such a friend as you could be, if you would, to counsel and to aid me. But, pardon me, I am detaining you, and you have another guest." (How ardently Lydia Graham wished she had not invited the accommodating widow to play propriety!) "You will permit me to visit you soon again, and we will speak of much which cannot now be discussed. May I come soon?"

As he spoke these hope-inspiring words, there was genuine eagerness in the tone of Douglas Dale's voice, there was brightness in his frank eyes. No wonder Lydia held the story her brother had told her in scornful disbelief; no wonder she felt all the glow of the fulfilment of long-deferred hope. What would have been her sensations had she known that Douglas Dale's only actuating motive in the proposed friendly alliance, was to secure a female friend for his adored Paulina, to gain for her the countenance and protection of a woman whose place in society was recognized and unassailable?

"You will excuse my joining your brother and your friend now, will you not, Miss Graham? I must, at all events, have taken an early leave of you, and this conversation has given me much to think of. I shall see you soon again. Good night!"

He moved hastily, passed through the door of the small apartment which, opened on the staircase, and was gone. Lydia Graham remained alone for a few moments, in a triumphant reverie, then she joined Gordon Graham and the bewitching widow, who had been making the most of the opportunity for indulging in her favourite florid style of flirtation.

"I have won," Lydia said to herself; "and how easily! Poor fellow; his agitation was really painful. He did not even stop to shake hands with me."

Mrs. Marmaduke took leave of her dearest Lydia, and her dearest Lydia's brother, soon after Douglas Dale had departed, and Miss Graham and her brother were left _tête-à-tête_.

"Well," said Gordon Graham, with rather a sulky air, "you don't seem to have done much execution by your dinner-party, my young lady. Dale went off in a great hurry, which does not say much for your powers of fascination."

Lydia gave her head a triumphant little toss as she looked at her brother.

"You are remarkably clever, my dear Gordon," she said; "but you are apt to make mistakes occasionally, in