CHAPTER XVIII

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A GROWING CLOUD OF WITNESSES.

“My dear child, how are you?” cried the duchess and kissed Ravenel on both cheeks.

She was the last arrival of the house-party, and she sank into a low chair by the fire and surveyed the scene, covertly and without her long-handled glasses.

The big hall of Levallion Castle was lit by two fires and a sufficiency--no more--of shaded lamps. There were plenty of cozy corners and secluded chairs behind the great square pillars supporting the low roof, where dull gold gleamed fitfully in the fire flicker. Among the orderly disorder of chairs and tables and palms, people were sitting in twos and threes--occasionally drinking tea, laughing, warming themselves, and wondering what sort of a married man Levallion made. His past record happily did not point to a dull sojourn under his roof.

But the duchess, like Gallio, cared for none of these things.

Her red, comfortably handsome face was turned to the sumptuous figure at the tea-table, all white velvet and Russian sable and floating, wavy chiffon.

“I am Annesley’s little girl, turned into an accordion-plaited angel!” thought her grace, blind to everything but surprise. For Ravenel under her wing had been only a remarkably pretty girl, rather quick, almost shy. And here stood a beautiful woman, utterly self-possessed, and a work of art from her carefully dressed hair to the way her great gray eyes looked up from her tea-making.

“A maid, that’s the reason of those beautifully done waves!” thought the duchess. “But how much prettier she is than I imagined. A woman with those eyebrows and that upper lip might do anything. But what color there is in her face, with those gray-blue eyes and black eyebrows and that surprising bronze hair! She looks--eh, what--Levallion? Oh, tea!”

“It’s usual at this hour--or would you rather----”

“Don’t worry me, my good man!” smartly. “She looks well, Levallion; happier, I think!”

“She is very well.” He glanced at his wife across the buzzing room. The duchess was right, she did look happier. The queer, stony look that had been in her eyes was gone. It seemed to him that the change in her dated from one evening when he had found her sitting alone in her room, with a burning color in her cheeks and quick unwonted questions on her tongue. He remembered them now. “Levallion, you really love me? You didn’t marry me because Sylvia arranged it--nor just to have a wife? You would have married me all the same even if I’d told you why----” but she had never finished.

“I married you for love, and nothing else,” he had answered quietly, and she had watched him as he said it, then turned from him and spoke laboredly, over her shoulder.

“I’ll do my best to be a good wife to you.”

But even now he never imagined how at that moment she come of her own accord to believe in what was true, that he had known nothing of Sylvia’s maneuvering. And her duty lay plain before her. To take up the life she had deliberately made for herself and be a loyal wife to the man who had always “been good” to her. Very barren, very dreary, in spite of Levallion’s kindness that life lay before her, but she would tread it faithfully to the very end. And unconsciously a great joy leaped to her eyes and ever since had burned there steadily. Adrian might be lost to her a thousand times more than ever, but in her soul she could worship him, for he had been true.

But Levallion, poor fool, had thanked God for that rapture in her eyes; a man, too, who was not in the habit of thanking God for anything.

“There’s peace in her face,” said the duchess shortly, having followed his eyes in that long pause. “Well, well! You’re a better man than I thought, Levallion. Send Tommy to me with the tea cake. You make me nervous when you watch me eat.”

Sir Thomas came without much alacrity. He had a better opinion of the duchess’ shrewdness than Levallion; and he was not easy in his mind. He knew quite well that Ravenel’s renewed beauty and the quiet of her face dated from that interview with Adrian Gordon, that he had not discovered in time to prevent. He was uncomfortably conscious that for all he knew the household might be sitting on a volcano.

“And how are you?” inquired his friend with her mouth full. “I hear Lady Annesley is cutting a dash at Harrogate. I don’t suppose you miss her!”

“Not much!” stolidly, though he would rather a hundred times have been back under her ladyship’s rule and been sitting half-fed at Annesley Chase with the old Ravenel, than here in Levallion’s house with a sister who would not meet his eye.

“I’m not pining away for Lady Annesley.”

“She’d give her eyes to be here,” the duchess chuckled unkindly. “You seem to have an extremely cheerful collection. By the way, how’s young Gordon? I hear he’s been very ill here?”

“He’s better,” shortly. “He had a sort of relapse last week. But he’s coming down to dinner to-night. We”--hastily--“haven’t seen anything of him. He’s had a nurse.”

But the duchess merely murmured that it was a sad case, a man with a shattered bridle arm being of no further use in a hussar regiment; and passed serenely on. She had no intention of telling Tommy that she had found out all about that marriage that never came off. The curate at Effingham had talked, and the whole parish knew about the couple who had never come to be married, but had wasted a special license and the curate’s time. Ravenel’s past was no business of any one’s but Levallion, who would never hear it.

“If she has any sense she knows by this time that Levallion’s little finger is worth a whole string of lovesick soldiers,” she thought. “I never saw a man so softened and improved in all my life. He looks twenty years younger. But all the same, if he’s wise, he won’t press his distinguished young relative to an indefinite stay.”

But even the duchess felt a shocked pity that night at dinner as she looked across the flowers and gold plate and saw how very ill and worn Captain Gordon looked. Why, the man was a death’s head. A romantic, undesirable death’s head, with its arm in a sling. She glanced at Ravenel and saw to her infinite relief that she was not so much as looking Gordon’s way. Exquisitely fair in ivory satin and burned orange velvet, she was talking to the man on her right hand with her old childlike mirth. But the duchess was near-sighted. Sir Thomas Annesley could have told her that there was anything but mirth in Ravenel’s steady eyes. And truly repentance, impotent pain, and fear were doing their work. Under that smart bodice Lady Levallion’s heart was aching dully while she made conversation, as many a better woman’s has done and will do while the world goes round.

She knew quite well that the width of a white table-cloth separated her from Adrian as utterly as a gulf of a thousand miles. Knew that after dinner he would never speak to her, except in the few sentences decently demanded from guests to hostess; that as soon as he could he would get away from the house.

“Oh, I’ve simply got to speak to him!” she thought. “If I have to make the chance myself,” for there were two things she had forgotten to ask him, and one of them rankled. Why had he said he was too poor to marry her openly, and all the while was Levallion’s sole heir? The probable successor to the richest earldom in England is not usually considered a bad match, even by more greedy people than Ravenel. And who was the woman who had come to ask after him; though she cared very little, or she determined to think so. She came out of her thoughts with a jerk, suddenly conscious that she had not the least idea what the man beside her was saying.

“I was thinking how pretty all the women are,” she observed quickly, to avoid having to say. “I beg your pardon.”

Lord Chayter surveyed the table. It was quite true, every woman there was a picture in her way; and nearly all he saw were dark; and made a foil to the peachy loveliness, the curled bronze head of their hostess.

“My own wife’s the only one of ’em I’d care to kiss though!” he remarked, rather after the manner of Levallion, who was his dearest friend.

“That’s very charming--and proper--of you!”

“No! It’s the ‘hard kalsomine finish’ that appals me,” coolly. “Come now, Lady Levallion, you don’t mean to say you can’t see it?”

For Ravenel, who owned no rouge-pot and eschewed powder, was looking at him bewilderedly.

“I thought----” she began, and then laughed, but not too gaily, “was everything in the grand world a sham, even down to the lovely color on the women’s cheeks?”

“That all things were what they seemed? Well, they ain’t unfortunately! You really ought to be congratulated on your cook, Lady Levallion. I never ate better chicken done with almonds than this.”

“I hope you won’t get tired of it,” she returned. “Levallion is so fond of almonds. He arranges the dinners, you know. I should have roast beef and plum tart, he thinks--and so I would!”

Lord Chayter thought she looked as if she lived on peaches and cream; but he did not say so, for something caught his attention.

“Do you never have the blinds down in this room?” he inquired suddenly. “Oh, I see, there are none. But don’t you think it’s rather uncanny to look over the table and candles and things, and the ladies’ pretty frocks, to those blank, dark windows? It makes me feel creepy,” frankly. “As if ghosts might be peering in!”

“We never use this room when we’re alone. The windows must be a fancy of Levallion’s. I don’t see very well how we could have blinds on them.”

For the state dining-room was on the ground floor in the oldest part of the castle, and the windows were sunk deep and narrow in the six-foot wall which slanted away from them till each foot-wide window-glass made the apex of a wide stone V.

“I should!” said Lord Chayter, who was fat and fair and screwed-up eyed. “Makes me nervous. Now look, just opposite us! Couldn’t you swear some one was looking in? though, of course, it’s all fancy.”

Lady Levallion’s glance followed his and grew suddenly startled. For, though it was gone in an instant, even as she looked at it, there had been something like a white face, like gleaming eyes, pressed to the window-pane of the embrasured window.

“There, you see! Though it’s either imagination or a gardener’s boy,” said Lord Chayter. “Don’t look so frightened.”

“I’m not frightened,” quietly, “but I think you’re right. Those blank windows make the room uncanny. I’ll have something done to them to-morrow,” but like lightning her thoughts had flown at the sight of that face against the glass to the strange woman who had come to inquire for Adrian; though there could be no earthly connection.

“Let her look!” she thought contemptuously. “She won’t see much to please her. And not a soul in the house knows anything about Adrian and me, and that’s all I care about.” Quite unconscious that Tommy and the duchess suspected what Sister Elizabeth knew; and that every wind that blew, every hour that passed, was pushing her nearer to the greatest horror any woman can face.

“Screens would do it,” returned Lord Chayter serenely, turning some attention to his dinner, and determining to drop a hint to Levallion. For there were windows on both sides of the big room, and it seemed a coincidence that if any one had looked in they should have chosen the side behind and not facing Lord Levallion’s sharp eyes. He gave the subject what he considered a happy turn.

“Captain Gordon looks pretty shaky! He ought to be careful, if he prefers earth to heaven,” he observed. “Better keep him here and let some of these charming ladies take him in hand. He wants a course of petting, the platonic kind, you know!” Ravenel caught the duchess’ eye, and rose thankfully.

“Any one on earth to nurse me rather than you!” Adrian had said. But her punishment would be more than she could bear if she must stand by and see any of these women do it. She utterly forgot that white phantom face at the dark window.

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