The Secret Power - Marie Corelli (books to get back into reading TXT) 📗

hand and touching his arm—“To see what the thing that calls itself a man is made of! I did my very best with you, didn’t I?—uncouth as you always were and are!—but I did my best! And all Washington thought it was settled! Why wouldn’t you do what Washington expected?”

The light of the moon fell full on her upturned face. It was a wonderful face,—not beautiful according to the monotonous press- camera type, but radiant with such a light of daring intelligence as to make beauty itself seem cheap and meretricious in comparison with its glowing animation. He moved away from her another step, and shook his arm free from her touch.

“Why wouldn’t you?” she reiterated softly; then with a sudden ripple of laughter, she clasped her hands and uplifted them in an attitude of prayer—“Why wouldn’t he? Oh, big moon of California, why? Oh, pagan gods and goddesses and fauns and fairies, tell me why? Why wouldn’t he?”

He gave her a glance of cool contempt.

“You should have been on the stage!” he said.

“‘All the world’s a stage,’” she quoted, letting her upraised arms fall languidly at her sides—“And ours is a real comedy! Not ‘As You Like It’ but ‘As You Don’t Like It!’ Poor Shakespeare!—he never imagined such characters as we are! Now, suppose you had satisfied the expectations of all Washington City and married me, of course we should have bored each other dreadfully—but with plenty of money we could have run away from each other whenever we liked—they all do it nowadays!”

“Yes—they all do it!” he repeated, mechanically.

“They don’t ‘love’ you know!” she went on—“Love is too much of a bore. YOU would find it so!”

“I should, indeed!” he said, with sudden energy—“It would be worse than any imaginable torture!—to be ‘loved’ and looked after, and watched and coddled and kissed—”

“Oh, surely no woman would want to kiss you!” she exclaimed—“Never! THAT would be too much of a good thing!”

And she gave a little peal of laughter, merry as the lilt of a sky- lark in the dawn. He stared at her angrily, moved by an insensate desire to seize her and throw her down the hill like a bundle of rubbish.

“To kiss YOU,” she said, “one would have to wear a lip-shield of leather! As well kiss a bunch of nettles! No, no! I have quite a nice little mouth—soft and rosy! I shouldn’t like to spoil it by scratching it against yours! It’s curious how all men imagine women LIKE to kiss them! They never grasp an idea of the frequent unpleasantness of the operation! Now I’m going!”

“Thank God!” he ejaculated fervently.

“And don’t worry yourself”—she continued, airily—“I shall not stay long at the Plaza.”

“Thank God again!” he interpolated.

“It would be too dull,—especially as I’m not shamming to be ill, like you. Besides, I have work to do!—wonderful work! and I don’t believe in doing it shut up like a hermit. Humanity is my crucible! Good-night,—good-bye!”

He checked her movement by a quick, imperious gesture.

“Wait!” he said—“Before you go I want you to know a bit of my mind-

-”

“Is it necessary?” she queried.

“I think so,” he answered—“It will save you the trouble of ever trying to see me again, which will be a relief to me, if not to you. Listen!—and look at yourself with MY eyes—”

“Too difficult!” she declared—“I can look at nothing with your eyes any more than you can with mine!”

“Madam—”

She uttered a little laughing “Oh!” and put her hand to her ears.

“Not ‘Madam’ for heaven’s sake!” she exclaimed; “It sounds as if I were either a queen or a dressmaker!”

His sombre eyes had no smile in them.

“How should you be addressed?” he demanded, “A woman of such wealth and independence as you possess can hardly be called ‘Miss’ as if she were in parental leading-strings!”

She looked up at the clear dark sky where the moon hung like a huge silver air-ball.

“No, I suppose not!” she replied—“The old English word was ‘Mistress.’ So quaint and pretty, don’t you think?”

‘Oh mistress mine, where are you roaming? Oh stay and hear! your true love’s coming!’

She sang the two lines in a deliciously entrancing voice, full of youth and tenderness. With one quick stride he advanced upon her and caught her by the shoulders.

“My God, I could shake the life out of you!” he said, fiercely—“I wonder you are not afraid of me!”

She laughed, careless of his grasp.

“Why should I be? You couldn’t kill me if you tried—and if you could—”

“If I could—ah, if I could!” he muttered, fiercely.

“Why then there would be another murderer added to the general world of murderers!” she said—“That’s all! It’s not worth it!”

Still he held her in his grip.

“See here!” he said—“Before you go I want yon to know a thing or two,—you may as well learn once for all my views on women. They’re brief, but they’re fixed. And they’re straight! Women are nothing— just necessary for the continuation of the race—no more. They may be beautiful or homely—it’s all one—they serve the same purpose. I’m under no delusions about them. Without men they are utterly useless,—mere waste on the wind! To idealise them is a stupid mistake. To think that they can do anything original, intellectual or imaginative is to set one’s self down an idiot. YOU,—you the spoilt only child of one of the biggest rascal financiers in New York,—YOU, left alone in the world with a fortune so vast as to be almost criminal—you think you are something superlative in the way of women,—you play the Cleopatra,—you are convinced you can draw men after you—but it’s your money that draws them,—not YOU! Can’t you see that?—or are you too vain to see it? And you’ve no mercy on them,—you make them believe you care for them and then you throw them over like empty nutshells! That’s your way! But you never fooled ME,—and you never will!”

He released her as suddenly as he had grasped her,—she drew her white draperies round her shoulders with a statuesque grace, and lifted her head, smiling.

“Empty nutshells are a very good description of men who come after a woman for her money”—she observed, placidly—“and it’s quite natural that the woman should throw them over her shoulder. There’s nothing in them—not even a flavour! No—never fooled you,—you fooled yourself—you are fooling yourself now, only you don’t know it. But there!—let’s finish talking! I like the romance of the situation—you in your shirt-sleeves on a hill in California, and I in silken stuff and diamonds paying you a moonlight visit—it’s really quite novel and charming!—but it can’t go on for ever! Just now you said you wanted me to know a thing or two, and I presume you have explained yourself. What you think or what you don’t think about women doesn’t interest me. I’m one of the ‘wastes on the wind!’ I shall not aid in the continuation of the race,—heaven forbid! The race is too stupid and too miserable to merit continuance. Everything has been done for it that can be done, over and over again, from the beginning—till now,—and now—NOW!” She paused, and despite himself the tone of her voice sent a thrill through his blood of something like fear.

“NOW?—well! What NOW?” he demanded.

She lifted one hand and pointed upwards. Her face in the moonbeams looked austere and almost spectral in outline.

“Now—the Change!” she answered—“The Change when all things shall be made new!”

A silence followed her words,—a strange and heavy silence.

It was broken by her voice hushed to an extreme softness, yet clearly audible.

“Good-night!—good-bye!”

He turned impatiently away to avoid further leave-taking—then, on a sudden impulse, his mood changed.

“Morgana!”

The call echoed through emptiness. She was gone. He called again,— the long vowel in the strange name sounding like “Mor-ga-ar-na” as a shivering note on the G string of a violin may sound at the conclusion of a musical phrase. There was no reply. He was—as he had desired to be,—alone.

CHAPTER III

“She left New York several weeks ago,—didn’t you know it? Dear me!- -I thought everybody was convulsed at the news!”

The speaker, a young woman fashionably attired and seated in a rocking chair in the verandah of a favourite summer hotel on Long Island, raised her eyes and shrugged her shoulders expressively as she uttered these words to a man standing near her with a newspaper in his hand. He was a very stiff-jointed upright personage with iron grey hair and features hard enough to suggest their having been carved out of wood.

“No—I didn’t know it”—he said, enunciating his words in the deliberate dictatorial manner common to a certain type of American— “If I had I should have taken steps to prevent it.”

“You can’t take steps to prevent anything Morgana Royal decides to do!” declared his companion. “She’s a law to herself and to nobody else. I guess YOU couldn’t stop her, Mr. Sam Gwent!”

Mr. Sam Gwent permitted himself to smile. It was a smile that merely stretched the corners of his mouth a little,—it had no geniality.

“Possibly not!” he answered—“But I should have had a try! I should certainly have pointed out to her the folly of her present adventure.”

“Do you know what it is?”

He paused before replying.

“Well,—hardly! But I have a guess!”

“Is that so? Then I’ll admit you’re cleverer than I am!”

“Thats a great compliment! But even Miss Lydia Herbert, brilliant woman of the world as she is, doesn’t know EVERYTHING!”

“Not quite!” she replied, stifling a tiny yawn—“Nor do you! But most things that are worth knowing I know. There’s a lot one need never learn. The chief business of life nowadays is to have heaps of money and know how to spend it. That’s Morgana’s way.”

Mr. Sam Gwent folded up his newspaper, flattened it into a neat parcel, and put it in his pocket.

“She has a great deal too much money”—he said, “and-to my thinking- she does NOT know how to spend it,-not in the right womanly way. She has gone off in the midst of many duties to society at a time when she should have stayed—”

Miss Herbert opened her brown, rather insolent eyes wide at this and laughed.

“Does it matter?” she asked. “The old man left his pile to her ‘absolutely and unconditionally’—without any orders as to society duties. And I don’t believe YOU’VE any authority over her, have you? Or are you suddenly turning up as a trustee?”

He surveyed her with a kind of admiring sarcasm.

“No. I’m only an uncle,”—he said—“Uncle of the boy that shot himself this morning for her sake!”

Miss Herbert uttered a sharp cry. She was startled and horrified.

“What!. . . Jack?. . . Shot himself?. . . Oh, how dreadful!—I’m— I’m sorry—!”

“You’re not!”—retorted Gwent—“So don’t pretend. No one is sorry for anybody else nowadays. There’s no time. And no inclination. Jack was always a fool—perhaps he’s best out of it. I’ve just seen him— dead. He’s better-looking so than when alive.”

She sprang up from her rocking chair in a blaze of indignation.

“You are brutal!” she exclaimed, with a half sob—“Positively brutal!”

“Not at all!” he answered, composedly—“Only commonplace. It is you advanced women that are brutal,—not we left-behind men. Jack was a fool, I say—he staked the whole of his game on Morgana Royal, and he lost. That was the last straw. If he could have married her he would have cleared all his debts over