CHAPTER XXI
After a little, she dragged herself up wearily and went back to the drawing room. The young count brightened visibly at her appearance. Mrs. Le Roy told her that she had stayed out too long in the night air and dew.
"You look as cold and white as the moonlight," she said.
Laurel made her some careless answer and sat down. Count Fitz John engaged her in conversation. He was delighted to find someone who could converse fairly in his native tongue, and he never wearied of gazing on her rare type of beauty, and her tasteful dress that appealed so forcibly to his artistic eye. He admired her, perhaps, all the more that she piqued him a little by her quietness and girlish dignity. She was not flattered by his notice as other girls were. On the contrary, if he had not been rather self-conceited, he must have seen that she was decidedly bored.
St. Leon and his fair guest came in almost an hour later. Laurel did not look up at their entrance, though she felt her cheeks growing hot, with the bitter wonder that was in her mind.
Did St. Leon Le Roy suspect that she cared for him? Had he fathomed the secret of her heart before she really understood it herself? Was that the secret of his coldness, his almost harshness to her? Had he used
"This rough discourtesy
To break or blunt her passion?"
The hot color flashed into her sensitive face. She tried not to hear his clear, firm voice, as he talked to Mrs. Merivale. To drown those tones, she was obliged to listen attentively to the count and to talk more herself. She roused herself to almost vivacity. She would be gay. No one should guess how her heart was bleeding. She succeeded so well in her efforts that the Frenchman was delighted. He thought that he had at last begun to make an impression on the lovely girl, and Laurel, never glancing toward the others did not know with what a frowning brow St. Leon watched her apparent coquetries.
But the interminable evening was over at last. Laurel could never have told how she got through it, but at last, they had all gone to their rooms, and Laurel stood before the long glittering mirror in her dressing room gazing with sad eyes and trembling lips at the face reflected there as at a new creature—a girl who for three months had been living a strange unconscious love-dream, and who had first found out that she had a heart by its bitter aching.
"Why did she love him? Curious fool, be still;
Is human love the growth of human will?"
Self-scorn and self-pity struggled together in her heart. She felt with a great throb of bitter shame that she had given her love unsought, unvalued, and to another woman's lover. Maud Merivale's words rang in her ears:
"I shall win him back, and this time no one shall come between us."
"He belongs to Maud Merivale. What matter? He never could have been mine," she said, to the white-faced, dark-eyed girl gazing back at her from the mirror with the red roses dying on her breast.
Yesterday she had been reading in a book in the library some pretty verses written over just such a mad and foolish love as this of hers. A fancy seized her to read them again in the light of this new revelation that had flashed upon her heart.
"I will slip down to the library and bring the book," she said, gliding out into the hall and down the broad stairway, shrinkingly, like a little white ghost.
The library was deserted, but the shaded reading lamp still burned over the center table with its litter of books and magazines.
The marble busts and statuettes against the book-lined walls looked grimly down upon her, this fair, golden-haired girl with that look of tragic sorrow on her pale face.
"He has been here," she murmured, softly, noting the faint fragrance of cigar smoke that pervaded the air.
She sat down in the great cushioned reading chair and then she saw another token of his presence—a knot of golden pansies he had worn in his button-hole that evening, and which now lay carelessly on the floor at her feet. She would never have guessed that he had thrown them there in passionate disdain because Maud Merivale's hand had pinned them on his breast.
Laurel picked up the poor dying flowers and held them tenderly.
"You have been near the rose," she murmured and pressed them to her lips in sudden, passionate love and sorrow. She could not help it. They spoke to her so plainly of the proud man who had won her heart all unwittingly. They made her think of the princely form, the dark, luring, splendid face, the proud, cynical, dark eyes, the curling lips like that once or twice only she had seen curved into a beautiful smile, subtly sweet and dangerous, which women had worshiped blindly, but which only shone upon them to betray their hopes to ruin.
She held the flowers, kissed them again and again, then threw them far from her in a sudden revulsion of feeling bordering on supreme self-contempt.
"Ah, if I could throw my hopeless passion from me thus lightly," she sighed.
She found the book she wished, and, tempted by the deep silence and quiet of the room, decided to remain awhile at least. With her fair head resting on her arm she began to read aloud softly, after an old habit of hers:
"'You walk the sunny side of fate,
The wise world smiles and calls you great.
The golden fruitage of success
Drops at your feet in plenteousness;
And you have blessings manifold;
Renown and power and friends and gold,
They build a wall between us twain
That may not be thrown down again.
Alas! for I the long time through
Have loved you better than you knew.'"
Suddenly a sweet, chilly breath of night air blew over her. She looked up and saw St. Leon Le Roy parting the heavy curtains of silk and lace at the bay window behind which he had been quietly sitting smoking a cigar.
Bewildered, startled, Laurel threw down her book and sprung up in ignominious flight.
The master of Eden coolly caught her hands and forced her back into her seat.
"Why need you always fly from me as though I were an ogre?" he said, plaintively. "I shall not eat you, child, tempted as I might be to do so."
"I—I thought myself alone," she stammered, crimsoning under his mocking raillery.
"There is no harm done," he answered, drawing up a chair in front of her and gazing at her with the same slow, sweet smile he had worn when he bade her return to his mother and the count that evening. "I was smoking at the window when you first came in, and I thought at first I would be still and not disturb you, thinking you would go in a moment. But you stayed, and—I changed my mind."
Fancying some covert meaning in his words, she answered, quickly:
"But it is late, and indeed I must be going upstairs now."
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