CHAPTER XII

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THE ICY BARRIER.

Ravenel Levallion, who had once been Ravenel Annesley, got up with weak and shaky legs and stared at the brown shadow of a man who stood between her and the sun. For man it was, and no spirit. When ghosts arise from the dead they are not ushered to their dearest by an obsequious butler, while two footmen with the tea things bring up the rear. Dreadful, inappropriate laughter that meant more than any tears shook the Countess of Levallion as she stood up in her white serge and Mechlin lace.

“Captain Gordon!” the butler repeated a little reproachfully, for this was not the way to receive his lordship’s cousin.

“I--I see him!” was all she could find to say; all the greeting she had for the man to whose side she had meant to creep on the resurrection day.

“Ravenel!” he whispered, and if her face were white, his was gray; all the wild, incredulous joy that had shone there at the first sight of her dead as ashes. “For God’s sake, how do you come here?”

But he knew. With a swift and dreadful certainty he remembered the butler had said Lady Levallion was at home--though he had not known there was one before--heard in the pause that came as she tried to answer him the smooth voice of a servant saying, “Tea is served, my lady.” Desperately the girl caught at her breath that would not come; and her first word was for the footman, and not for him.

“Yes,” she said, “you can go,” and then, with a coward’s courage, turned to Adrian Gordon.

“I live here. I’m his wife.” For her life she could not look at him with the triumph a woman should have in her revenge on a man who has deceived her. “But you--you died! We heard it this morning.”

We! Captain Gordon--and that man must have been a fool who first christened the Gordon’s “gay”!--grew as black and sour and stern as Levallion at his worst.

“You,” he said, “cannot have read the papers of late, since you only knew this morning that I was missing. I never--except to you--was in the very least dead, though, God knows, I wish I had been!”

“How did you get here?” She was still standing, holding herself up with tense hands on her wicker chair.

“Sit down,” said the man, because she was a woman. But she never moved.

“Tell me,” she said thickly.

“It can’t interest you.” He felt suddenly listless, utterly indifferent; looked not at her, but the grass. “I turned up one morning at the fort. They invalided me home, and I got here yesterday. This morning,” and he might have been saying a lesson for all the feeling in his voice, “I reported myself at the War Office and found Levallion had been there, thinking me dead, so I came down after him. I would not have come if I had known----” He did not trouble to finish.

“He’s not here. You must have caught an earlier train,” incoherent from anger that he should own he had been afraid to meet her. “But he’s coming.”

“Naturally,” with ugly quiet.

He never looked up, and he could not feel her eyes on his face, half-wild with the joy of seeing him and the horror of knowing--face to face with him--what he was. Oh! if she could have gone back to the May that was gone forever, how she would have cried out at the dreadful change in his face. The hollow cheeks, the sunken eyes, the----

“Why is your arm in a sling?” she cried, with scorn of herself that she could not be glad of his pain.

“Shot,” with an inward curse that might have made the man who did it turn in his grave, since it was that shattered arm that had brought him here.

“Sit down,” said Lady Levallion, and she said it so tonelessly that in astonishment he obeyed her. “You are not fit to stand.”

“Why should you care?”

“I don’t,” she returned calmly, and for an instant did not think it was a lie.

The callousness of his manner had hardened her heart; her forgiveness that had been so real vanished. She felt old, old and weary, where she sat in her Worth dress. If she had dared she would have cried out that to be Nell Annesley again in her Sunday frock, thinking the man she loved was true, she would give the soul out of her body. She gripped herself hard, and spoke to him as to any one of those friends of Levallion’s who were here to-day and gone to-morrow----since she could not call him “contemptible” to his face.

“May I give you some tea?” Her voice stung like a whip. Almost he had had it on his tongue to say, “Why did you do it--who taught you your woman’s game?”

But as he glanced at her across Levallion’s old silver and Crown Derby he had his answer. A secret marriage and a twopenny emerald ring were well changed for all this.

“I must be going,” he said. But as he rose a twinge caught him, and he sat back stiffly.

“You were foolish to come,” she said, with a coldness that hid a mad, shameful longing to ease his bodily pain, for any other he could not have, since he had done everything by his own free will.

“You had better have wine than tea,” striking a little silver gong!

Her bread and salt were choking; but before the footman who brought the wine there was nothing to do but swallow it. Not six months ago she would have looked at him as he raised the glass to his lips, cried “My love to you,” as he drank it. To-day--without a glance at him--she filled her own teacup with a steady hand.

The silence when the servant was gone was like something tangible; a barrier that could be felt. Gordon had absolutely nothing to say, and she was no better. While he gulped down the unwelcome wine, without which he must have fainted, she was back again in that country lane, counting her thousand steps; back in the drawing-room of Annesley Chase, where “Levallion had been kind.” Her heart was like a stone in her as she watched Gordon covertly. How drawn and hard his face was, and he was only nine and twenty. He did not look so very far from death even now, and the thought hurt her, for all her shame that she could care.

“Did you get the second man?” she blurted out in the sudden knowledge that she must say something, anything.

“No!” with a grim surprise that she should ask. “I may say that he got me. It was he who took me back to camp.”

If she could have realized the pitiful return of those two scarecrow skeletons who had been prisoners with the Afghans, known how they came home in the darkness, crawling, worn out, despairing, when the blessed challenge of their own sentry came on their ears, for sheer pity she must have broken down; have asked him without shame, as one asks the dead, why he had left her to break her heart; have said things that might have been the beginning of an end bad enough, but better than the one her girl’s feet must tread. But the scanty sentences drew no picture for her. Instead she saw only that there was a line of gold wire round his third finger that was half the size it had been, and wondered if it were his wife’s ring.

“They will give you the V. C. for the first man,” she said hastily, and wondered how many men would get the V. C. if it were given for truth and not for valor.

“I don’t know. It was nothing. Every fellow would have done it. Who told you, about the V. C., I mean?”

“Levallion” was on her lips, when she saw the gold wire of his ring catch the sunlight. The shame of a woman who has loved a man who jilts her caught her at her heart.

“My husband,” she said quietly.

And this time it was Adrian Gordon who quivered where he sat.

“I must go!” he said, cursing himself for a fool that he should be here talking to the girl who had seemed to him the very flower of the earth, and was only a woman who loved rank and money. “I must get back to town.”

Back to his lonely rooms, where the tint of her cheek and the curve of her eyelash, the bow of her young mouth, would rise before him line by line and make him revile the fate that had let him find her out.

Back to loneliness, to pain that racked him, to the fever that would make him drain his water-jug before the morning, but each and all of them better than seeing, as he did now, how she would not meet his eyes. But the last person who should know he cared was Levallion’s wife.

“You will tell Levallion”--after all, he was not as callous, or, perhaps, as brave, as she; he could not say “your husband”--“that I had no idea I should not find him here. Perhaps he will look me up in town.”

“Is that all?” she said stupidly, seeing only how very ill he looked as he stood before her.

“All!” surprised. “Yes, I wanted to thank him; it was through him I got to the front.”

“I thought.” She was faltering, and she hated herself.

“Do you know,” she said with sudden, vicious cruelty, “that you have never congratulated me on my marriage?” and then could have died of shame, for he was answering her as a man does who is born, not made, a gentleman.

“Levallion is one of the best,” quietly. “Certainly I congratulate you.”

Yet the words were hardly out of his mouth before she was angry again that he, who had deceived her, should say them.

“Here is Levallion,” she cried. “You had better congratulate him!”

He bit his lips that he had not gone before; turned sharply, and struck his shattered arm against her chair. The grinding torture turned the daylight black--he was going--going----

With a quick cry Lady Levallion leaped forward and caught him as he fell in a dead faint.

Long afterward the scene came up before her husband’s eyes, just as those two had looked against the sunset. And at the memory of her quick, inarticulate cry he buried his worn, handsome face in his hands. But now Lord Levallion only lifted the weight that was too heavy for his wife’s strong young arms and laid his cousin on the grass.

“The returned hero is not out of the graveyard yet!” he remarked. “Let him lie, Ravenel, and ring for the servants.”

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