Chapter XXVIII: Adding Insult to Injury

Philip had consulted an eminent and not over-scrupulous brother lawyer--laid his case before him, and learned that it would not be a very difficult matter to obtain a divorce from Arley, and without any unpleasant publicity, too; meanwhile he intended to make the most of his opportunities and cultivate the favor of the beautiful and wealthy Countess of Mordaunt.

As soon after the dinner hour as he thought it would do, he presented himself at the Hamiltons’ parlor door.

Lady Hamilton was there alone, Sir Anthony having lingered in the smoking-room below, after dinner, and she received him with her usual gracious hospitality.

Ere long he succeeded in engaging her in her favorite game--chess--and prepared to make a long siege of it, for he was determined to have an interview with Lady Elaine before he left, if possible.

She had retired to her own chamber immediately after dinner to write some letters, and to record in her diary the important facts which she had that afternoon gleaned from Jane Collins. So she knew nothing of Philip’s visit, and was entirely unconscious of the uncomfortable state of unrest and nervous expectation in which he sat watching the door leading to her room, hoping every moment to see it open, and its fair occupant come forth.

He played with Lady Hamilton until she grew so sleepy that she nodded over the game, frequently making mistakes in her moves, but he prolonged it by every device he could think of, stubbornly resolved not to relinquish his purpose.

Lady Elaine at last made her appearance, and his face cleared instantly.

She stopped upon the threshold, and seemed half tempted to retreat when she saw him; then, appearing to change her mind, she came forward and seated herself before the glowing grate, but merely recognizing him by a grave bend of her fair head.

Now, with a few quick, decisive moves, Philip brought a knight, bishop and pawn to bear upon Lady Hamilton’s king, and an immediate “check-mate” was the result.

“I am very stupid to-night, I fear, Mr. Paxton,” his opponent smilingly affirmed, as she began to arrange the exquisite men in their beautiful, inlaid box. “I think we shall have to postpone the ‘rubber’ until another evening. I wonder,” she added, “where Sir Anthony is at this hour--he seldom goes out after dinner.” She arose, and, going to a window, looked out upon the street, but a moment after her maid came into the room to ask her some question, and then, excusing herself, she retired to her own apartment with her.

Philip heaved a sigh of relief as mistress and maid disappeared; he had seen nothing, scarcely been conscious of anything, save that quiet figure with its grave, sweet face, sitting in the firelight, ever since Lady Elaine entered; and now, as the door closed after Lady Hamilton, he arose abruptly, crossed the space between them, and stood before her on the rug.

“Lady Elaine,” Philip began, with that air of proud humility which he knew so well how to assume, while he bent his dark, magnetic eyes upon her, “the very atmosphere is heavy with censure, oppressing me with the conviction that I have done something, either to annoy or offend you; tell me of what I have been guilty that I may atone to the extent of my power.”

She turned her grave glance upon him--a clear, searching accusing glance, that, though he did not once mistrust her knowledge of his perfidy, made his heart throb with a strange, depressing heaviness.

“The question is whether you would be willing to atone if I should tell you,” she said, slowly, and with a seriousness that sent a chill of foreboding creeping along his nerves.

“Ah! then you have something against me!” he said, with a quick, long-drawn breath. It was strange how he seemed to dread incurring her displeasure.

“Yes, I have something against you,” she repeated, as slowly as before, and still keeping her grave, sweet eyes upon his face.

What a look it was! it filled him with a mysterious pain. He felt something as a spirit of evil must feel in the presence of an angel of light.

“What have I done?” he demanded, in a thick, husky voice, “tell me! I cannot endure this suspense; no one could be more sorry than I am to offend you, though I am ignorant of any sin, and there is no atonement that I will not make; try me, and see--there is nothing that I would not do for you, Lady Elaine.”

Again a beautiful flush crimsoned her whole face, but she straightened herself slightly in her chair; there was something in his look and in the emphasis which he had employed that offended her.

But, aside from that slight change of position, she gave him no sign that his words had moved her in the least.

After a moment of thought, she replied:

“If I thought that you really would atone--if I could believe it, it would change my opinion of you greatly.”

“Can you not believe it?” he cried, a dark flush mounting to his brow at the lack of respect which her words seemed to imply, while he became greatly excited. “I told you to try me--no test will be too severe to prove my sincerity, I----”

He hesitated a moment, then with a gesture as if he was driven to desperation, as if he must leap every barrier and learn his fate, he took a step forward, and went on, passionately:

“I cannot keep silent any longer--I must speak--have you not seen, Lady Elaine, what a captive I have become? how I cannot keep away from you? Can you not see how all the old passion, which I once betrayed to you, has revived? No, that word I should not use, for it has never waned, though, when I found that you loved another, I strove to crush it out of my heart; but it was of no use, and now I love--I idolize you a hundredfold--you have become the one hope of my life, and though I may be premature in this declaration, yet the thought of your displeasure, the fear that I have offended you, has driven me to it, and forced it from my lips. Oh, my beautiful beloved, will you doubt now that I will stand any test? Try me and see; but pray give me a crumb of comfort to feed upon and I will try to be content with whatever probation you may see fit to put me on. Dearest, tell me that I may hope for your love, and you will give me an incentive that will make me courageous to scale the loftiest heights, or dig to the lowest depths for treasures to lay at your feet.”

Lady Elaine read him like a printed page, and she knew that instead of experiencing any real affection for her, he was now, as before, simply seeking to obtain a fortune to gratify his ambition for position and his love of ease, while she was to be but the stepping-stone by which he hoped to secure it.

“How can you dare,” she said, “to come to me this evening and say what you have said to me? I wonder that the words did not paralyze your tongue as you uttered them. You ask with such an injured, innocent air what you have done to offend me. What have you not done? All your treachery of the past year has been revealed to me, and you seem so little, and mean, and ignoble to me that I could almost trample upon you. That is not right, I know, for you are one of God’s creatures, and if He sees fit to let you live among respectable people I have no right to question His wisdom; but my patience and charity have been sadly tried by what I have learned to-day of your treatment of my dearest friend. You won her, a noble, trusting girl--a girl so true and upright, so sensitively conscious by nature, that she preferred to endure any amount of personal humiliation and self-denial rather than be guilty of a wrong toward any one, or commit a mean or unworthy act. She became your wife, believing that you loved her, and would fulfill to the letter the vows which you spoke so solemnly when you stood by her side before the altar. But how have you kept those promises? You took her away from friends, from her home and country; you dragged her to a foreign city, where among those most barbarous people, she must have been more desolate than language can describe; while your treatment of her drove her to desperation--drove her to the necessity of working to pay for the bread which she ate, and for the roof which sheltered her! And then, when she had worn herself out; when heart and nature both failed her, and she lay sick, week after week--some of the time almost unto death--you never went to her assistance; you never exerted yourself to see that she had proper care or attendance, or the comforts which, in her helplessness, she needed.”

“Great Heavens! how do you know--who has told you this?” burst from Philip Paxton’s white lips, while he stood staring, almost wildly, at the girl before him, great drops of cold perspiration beading his forehead.

“It does not signify how I know it,” Lady Elaine returned, with curling lips; “you perceive that I do know it.”

“Has Arley written to you? Have you heard from her?” he interrupted, feeling sure that she could never have learned so much from any other source.

“No, Arley has not written one word--she has been heroically silent throughout all her trouble. I think not even Miss McAllister mistrusts the terrible ordeal to which you have subjected the dear child whom she loved so fondly, and to whom she would have flown on the wings of love, had she even dreamed of what she was suffering. I would have gone to her--nothing should have kept me from her had I known. Philip Paxton, if Arley had died when she was so sick there in Madrid, you would have been--her murderer!”

“Don’t,” he cried, putting out his hand with an appealing gesture, while a shudder of repulsion ran over him at the sound of that startling word.

Standing there in Lady Elaine’s pure presence, while her scathing words rained like sharp hailstones fast and thick upon him, he began to see himself something as she saw him, while the scorn and contempt which pervaded her every word and gesture actually made him feel faint and sick.

“Don’t!” she repeated, with such stinging sarcasm that he cringed as if she had struck him a sharp blow. “Is it possible that after having used your wife so heartlessly--after realizing her wretchedness day after day, and looking unmoved upon her sufferings, you can shrink like this from the mere mention of them? The pitiful lies you have told me regarding Arley leaving you--of her appointments with another, and the money she received from him, are all explained, and I doubt not that the Englishman whom you, with such pretended righteous wrath, named as her ‘champion,’ was some noble man who, pitying her helplessness, offered her his protection, and will show her every respect which a pure woman should command. Why could you not have been a man, Philip Paxton, and worthy of a sweet, true woman like Arley Wentworth?”

He stood before her, abashed at last, his head bowed upon his chest, his arms folded so tightly across it that his every breath was labored, while his face, even to his lips, was as colorless as his shirt bosom.

“I have been mad!” he muttered, under his breath, but Lady Elaine heard him.

“You have been wicked,” she returned, relentlessly. “I did believe, when I first met you at Hazelmere, that there was a noble manhood within you, for the stamp of it seemed to rest upon your face; but how deceitful appearances are has been proved by your conduct since. Ah!” with a regretful sigh, “is it not a pity that a soul should become so warped and defiled? Why will mankind go so wrong, when the right way--even though difficulties seem to hedge us about--is always the better way?”

Philip lifted his head eagerly, and seemed about to reply as she ceased; then a deep flush suffused his whole face, and he dropped again into his former position.

Something in his look made Lady Elaine think that his better nature had been aroused at last, and a feeling of pity began to crowd some of the bitterness out of her heart.

“Why cannot you do right, Mr. Paxton? why will you not try to atone?” she pleaded, in a softened tone; but he interrupted her with an almost despairing gesture.

“It is too late for that,” he said, bitterly.

“I fear it is,” she answered, sadly. “I believe, if I were in Arley’s place, I should feel that there could be no atonement, and of course, if you do not love her----”

“Who says I do not love her?” he interrupted again, and almost fiercely; and Lady Elaine was dumb from wonder at his words.

“I do not wonder that you look astonished,” he went on, half defiant, half ashamed; “but if an evil spirit had not possessed me, I never should have lived the life which I have during the past twelve months. But my game is up, and I might as well make a clean breast of it; all I have won for my folly and sin is your contempt and aversion, and the loss of my wife’s love and respect. It cannot add to my humiliation to tell you that I have been aroused by being told that I must not aspire to your hand, while I had sworn to myself that I would be a rich and prosperous man at any cost, and that I would marry the richest woman I could find to achieve my object.

“You may curl your lips, Lady Elaine,” he went on, flushing again at her involuntary act. “I deserve it, but I tell you I have been mad. I failed in my efforts to win you, and then I turned to Arley as the next most tempting prize. I was honest enough in telling her that I loved her, for she was bright and beautiful, and attracted me as no other woman had ever done, and, when I found that your fortune was beyond my reach, my whole heart was set upon winning her. Had she contested Ina Wentworth’s claim, and kept her fortune, we might have been happy in each other to this day. But she would not keep it, and my cursed avarice and willfulness, my intolerance of being thwarted, has been my ruin.”

He paused a moment, and Lady Elaine saw that his face was as fixed and stony as that of a statue.

Presently he resumed:

“I did not, however, expect to be brought up in my career with such a round turn as you have given me to-night. There was, I believe, and as you have said, something of manhood within me once; but whether the germ remains, and will ever thrive, I suppose only time will show. Certainly, in my present mood I can neither form resolutions nor make promises. Regarding my presumption and folly to-night in renewing my offensive proposals to you, I fear it would only be adding insult to injury, and you would feel even more contempt for me than you have already manifested, if I should express regret and ask your pardon. The question would naturally arise whether I was most sorry for my sin, or for having been detected in it. But you have read me a bitter lesson; you have told me wholesome, though nauseous, truths, and have aroused my almost torpid conscience at last. Perhaps some time--for I know you have a tender heart--if I am able to prove to you that I am truly repentant, you will not then scorn to say that you forgive me. Till then, Lady Elaine, adieu.”