Novelist. [ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.] Love's Labour Won: AN EVENTFUL STORY.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXIII, Issue 2674, 31 August 1889, Page 5 (Supplement)

Novelist. [ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.] Love's Labour Won: AN EVENTFUL STORY.

BY JAMES GRANT. Author of •' The Romance of War," "The Black Watch," " Fairer than a fairy," &c, >V,c.

CHAPTER XXXII.—Lv ChowRIXGIIEK. EXT morning, Lonsdale, Montrosaor, and other of the general's party, were in Chowringher—the Parklane of Calcutta,—and were received at the entrance of Sir Hobart's residence by a whiskered and moustaohed durwan, or doorkeeper, with a crimson turban on his head, ready to strike the gong that suinoenced the arrival of a guest.

The house was a stately, one, with chunom-coated pillars, a splendid entablature round the roof, on which were a number of crows, cawing and picking, and a couple of enormous heron-like birds, called " adjutants,' , with long thin legs and stupendous beaks, sat drowsily. Guests were arriving fast, rand crowding the vast, spacious and airy Anglo-Indian drawing-roam, which had wide and lofty windows, with green jalousies, or ' A r enetians,' and, suspended between tho crossbeams, two largo punkahs, elabor-ately-fashioned and glided, with deep fringes and spans cut in them to clear the chandeliers, as these formidable ventilators were swayed to and fro by the wallahs, seated on their hams in the verandahs without, yet their action failed to clear the atmosphere, which was already steamy with something of the anpleasant vapour exhaled from a wet blanket stretched before a fire.

In the long double drawing-room there was plenty of gilding and a, variety of Chinese vases, Burmese and Hindoo idols, artificial flowers and alabaster pedestals, and rare English prints in light frames. The rooms were brilliantly lighted, and the jalousies that faced the veran-

dahs were open to the ground, and countless /lowers were there, in all their beauty and luxuriance. Musicians were turning over their music in a great muslin-curtained alclove , gay uniforms were flitting about; and Lady Tremayne, a pretty little woman—a trife rouged, which is

all fair in India—was rustling to

and fro among her guests, among whom were many pretty European girls (scarcely a Eurasian, of course) in charming dreases, and all denizens of Garden Reach, or of Chowringher, where the married aristocracy of the Presidency dwell.

The military element prevailed over the C.S. who were there, as usual in the black claw-hammer eo.'itaud expansive shirt front of civilisation —the same hideous evening costume that one now sees all the world over, with the inevitable opara-bat and buttou-bole.

Both Lonsdale and Montressor ■were acceptable guests to Lady Tremayne, as both were men with that indescribable air of perfect breeding which no parvenu can counterfeit.

" Where is the beauty !" whispm'd Diuivcrs to Travers, as the two iimde their way slowly and halfnimh'ssly through the throng.

" There she is, with old Doyley hanging over he, trying, no doubt, to wean her from her fetish, the Egytian hero, with his usual elaborate speeches, that, like those of Val Blake, have done service wherever the Queen's morning drum beats," replied Cecil Tracers, as they saw a rather bald-headed, grizzled, and very base, elderly looking man, in the uniform of a Dragoon Guard regiment, stooping over a young lady who was seated on a ottoman in the recess of an open window. He had an eyeglass screwed into his right eye —a knack of his—and his habit of suddenly turning it on anyone who approached was to some people embarassing ; to many rude.

She was dressed in a soft and clinging costume of black, in contrast to which her slender neck and rounded arms seemed as white as snow. She had rich chestnut hair, with a soft, curly fringe that shone like gold when the light struck it, soft dark eyes with long black lashes a nose that was just a little retrousee rather than straight, a colourless complexion ; and as she fanned herself her face wore just then a restless, uneasy, anxious and worried expression, which Charlie Danvers supposed was due to annoyance at the attentions of her mature Dragoon admirer, whom she seemed to hear as if she heard him not.

" By Jove, she is perfect," muttered young Travers, as, with no small envy, he saw his chum Charlie about to be introduced to her by Lady Tremayne. " Perfect, even to slender, arched and pretty little feet."

To a keener observer than the young Body Guardsman, her face— a beautiful one certainly—would

have told of one whase life had known misfortune keenly—of a painful past and of a present in which, if there was much of calm, there was little of peace.

Danvers, though his hair was straw-coloured —yet carefully parted

in the middle—though his expressionless face was rather freckly, and

he had a pair of legs the thickest portion whereof each was the ankle, deemed himself rather an object of

interest. Like most empty-headed you men, though a past-master in shooting, tennis and polo, he had an unexhaustible flow of small talk ; but somehow he had none now.

Buttoned up to the throat in a tight tunic—he was on duty—with a gold sash across his left shoulder, a ditto belt round his waist, he felt very limp, and as he afterwards said, " all the go" was fairly out of him ; and, as Lady Tremayne Jed him forward to where her fair friend sat, ho could only gasp out a vague reply to some remark she made.

" I beg your pardon, Mr. Danvers," said Lady Tremayne; " but 1 did not hear what you said." " Only that it is very—hot," said

Danvers. "Of course ; but you are in India. What do you think of it V " That it would be all the better for being a little colder."

The lady, who was throughly acclimatised, and had been " stewed" for two years among the swamps of Arracoon, laughed at his wot very original remark, and said : " I must now introduce you as a recent arrival to Mrs. ' Danvers now found himself face to face with the beauty of whom all were talking ; but failed to catch her name, as just then a sudden and unexpected scene took place.

" Claire V burst from the lips of

Montressor. who, at that moment, approached. " Claire !" he repeated, in a low voice that was breathless and husky with astonishment and joy. The young beauty in black was Claire Richmond, his lost wife, yet looking so pure, so pale, and winning as ever—so much like her former self that he could almost have

been persuaded that the dire episode of the so-called " Irene," and

their subsequent separation, were portions of a ghastly, a terrible dream, and that now a blessed wakening and reality had come at last ; in this most unexpected time, and place, and manner?

The bewilderment was on his side, but the anguish on hers. Of

his innocence she knew nothing yet. "In monents of supreme excitement," it has been said, "we do not express surprise much ; indeed, in the shaken state of our senses we do not feel itat times." Claire rose to her feet, trembling and seemingly about to sink, and sink she did when Montressor drew near her, and she held up her hands deprecatingly and entreatingly, as if to keep his touch from her. Their recognition was complete.

But the wild excitement of the moment, with the heat of the room and of the climate, proved too much for her tender system and overstrung nerves. She reeled and fell back senseless into the arms of Colonel Doyley, and ultimately, ainid confusion and dismay, Montressor had to leave her with the Treumynes and await the events of the morrow.

" Odd, all this —dooceel odd— when she is engaged, they say, to Yal Blake," he beard young Travers

say ; " and he taught her to play billiards so well.

Sir Hobart became very stiff and pompous, while Lady Tremayne assumed a more than usually cold manner while she fanned herself vehemently, and said to some who gathered round her :

" This affair has been shockingly mismanaged and ill brought about."

Claire's outstretched hands and averted face seemed to give Montressor a sensation like the keen stab of a sword in his heart.

" Oh, Lonsdale," said lie, as they drove along the (Jhowringher road tegetherand wheeled off westward across the Esplanade towards Fort William, "I am too cowardly to kill myself or I should have resorted to the pistol long ago !"

" Cowardly ! You, Digby! You, whose war services occupy nearly half a page of ' Harte !' What a wild phrase to use," said his brother officer.

Meanwhile, good-natu red friends

were busy with the names of the luckless pair.

She had broken her father's heart ; she had run away from her husband with one of the Lancers, and assumed the name of Mrs. Richmond to impose upon the confiding Lady Tremayne. She had been overtaken in the midst of an outrageous flirtation with that roue, Colonel Doyley, of the King's Dragoon Guards ; and all the world knew what he was. Her sweetness was assummed ; her beauty was skilful

" making-up •" her occasional fits of sadness and depression were art ; her fainting in the drawing-room was no doubt less acting than a sign of guilt. And so poor Claire was roughly handled by all—even by the men, over their cigars and brandy-pawnee, in every club-house, barrack-room, and bungalow.

" What did she say when she held up her hands at his approach !" asked Travers.

" Don't touch me. Never do so again. We are strangers, or something to that purpose," replied some heedless fellow.

" By Jove ; strange, don't you know."

" Very strange."

" No doubt her poor devil of a mib thought so too ; yet she and Blake seemed to find each other , company very entertaining'. . The affair had been " shockingly mismanaged," Lonsdale certainly thought, and said so again and again to Montressor. There are few parts of her Majesty's dominions more addicted to

tittle-tattle, love of gossip—or gup, as it is named —if not deliberate scandal, than Pritish India, with all its vastness ; and now the denizens of Chowriughcr had ample scope for the wildest surmises at the sudden denouncement, discovery and mutual recognition, of which Lady Tremayne's drawing-room had so suddenly become the scene.

So society would talk, of course ; but it could say nothing with certaint}', and its most malicious guesses fell short, perhaps of the real painful story.

CHAPTER XXXIII.— Sequel to the Story of Montkessoh. Out of all this episode of Claire and Montressor wo might have woven a long- story, though apart from our own, one " piled up the agony," as tho phrase is ; but our narrative is not a romance.

The meeting came about thus : The veiled equestrienne on the Esplanade was, as the reader has no doubt surmised, Claire, who had seen and recognised in an agony of dismay, and love too, her husband —real or mock she know not still —though he knew her not ; and a painful scene had taken place between her and Lady Tremayne, whom she had accompanied as a humble friend to India, at the villa on the Chowringher-road. Kind, but blundering, Lady Tremayne did not quite understand the story of Claire as the latter, in her excitement related it, and only in so far as she fondly anticipated a reconciliation and reunion of those two by her means. Sho wove up quite a littlo romance, of which she was to be the good fairy, though she was certainly appalled afterwards, when, subsequent to the scene we have described, sho heard the details of Claire's flight in the night from Lynemouth. " Think of the future," Lady 1 Tremayne had said, with reference to the meeting on tho Esplanade.

" What future have I?" Claire had responded. "He is here now, actually in Calcutta—the man to whom I gave myself at the altar of my dead father's church—dead through his crime and sin—this man whom it ie a sin for me to love or think of ; and you tell me that to-morrow I shall see him again—speak with him —our hands even may touch again," she continued, wildly, as she rung her interlaced lingers. " No, no, no; let me never see him more !"

" He is under immediate orders for Burinah, the General told me," urged Lady Tremayne. " Perhaps he can now explain all to me, if not to you, Claire ; aad I see the hand of God in this."

But the girl shook her hoad wearily aud mournfully, with her dark oyos fixed on. seeming vacaucy. " My dear girl," rosumed Lady Tremayne, caressingly, " this misfortune, this strange and cruel accusation, may, I repeat, be explained away."

" It never can," sobbed Claire, "uover. 1 heard dreadful ac-

cusaton, to ■which he had not a word to say, but acknowledged to mo that the dark secret of his life would be tlie ruin of mine. Those were his words." " And he is coming to-morrow." " Montressor ?" " Yes." " Here—here ?" " With my brother-in-law, the general. Depend upon it, this .is no mere chance."

" What then ?" asked. Claire, desperately. " Destiny." "To hunt me from your liousohold and destroy my peace, by what may prove a public exposo ?"

" Not if you command yourself and retain your presence of mind. Destroy your peace, Claire ? God, who rules our fate, would not be so cruel. The wretched woman—an impostor, perhaps "

" She was no impostor. Digliy dared not call hor so."

" She who wrought you so much evil may he dead ; her assertions may be explained. Oh, be patient, be hopeful." " But, oh, Lady Tremayno, think of what you put upon mo—the pain the terror, of such an interview before strangers." " Thoir presence will compel control ; and consider—ho is under orders for Bu.xmah," said Lady TremayDO again, " and you may perhaps meet no more."

Then ifc was that a wild longing to see Montressor but once again struggled with Claire's sense of delicacy, even her sense of propriety and just resentment ; and she consented to appear, promising to avoid all that might lead to the issue of which all English folks have a genuine horror —a scone ; but she fainted, as -we have told, and the guests departed in confusion and haste.

After a time, to Lady Tremayne's great relief, her whito lips and eyelids unclosed. She found herself on a couch near a open window —open to the dewy Indian night. Thero was the fragrance of eau-de-cologne in the room, and of a restorative which someone held to her lips. A gasping sigh escaped her, and she gradually recovered, awakening again to a painful reaality, and wept as a child might have done on the breast of her friend, but somewhat mistaken monitress.

" A year to night," said Claire, gazing with a world of sadness on the wedding: ring to which, perhaps she had no right, and for which even her slender finger had grown too small, as she turned it round, with a wistful expression in her eyes ; "a year to-night since that awful one at Lynemouth. How strange ! how passing strange ! So I must cling to you. Dear Lady Treuiayne, I think you know now that lam one of those women of whom De Quincey wrote —one to whom real and true female friendship is more valuable than all the companionship the other sox can give. But, however," she added, with a painful little hysterical laugh, " to-night has proved that I am utterly destitute of self-posses-sion or presence of mind." Lady Tremayne regarded her anxiously, for in her soft, pale face was thejtired and worn expression of one who thought life not worth living. " I am without a husband, yet married; a girl, Lady Tremayne, without a girl's best inheritance— hope," said she, sadly; and she drew off, as vanities, the Delhi bangles her hostess had given her— not Blake, as gossip suggested. Meanwhile, Montressor was equally a prey to bitterness and grief, and felt himself involved in fresh mazes of wonder and perplexity. " Claire here ! here in Calcutta ! he kept repeating to himself, as if he could not believe the evidence of hia own senses. And both their minds were full of the same theme.

That last night in the cottage in Lynemouth, when the happy weeks of their newly-married life, amid the wonderful scenery of the valley of the rocks, by the fir-clad Lyn Cliff, in view of the sparkling sea and the dark ridges of Exmoor, came abruptly to a close—-the passionate appeals of Claire—the terror, the dismay at the advent, the apparent resurrection of the drowned woman, Irene Beaufort, as she called herself—all seemed to rush like a swift and agonising panorama before the eyes and memory of both, to bewilder and confuse them.

But the sleepless night was passed; morning came. With the light and sunshine hope grew apace in the breast of Montressor, who " chummed " with Lonsdale in his quarters : and with that hope grew fear, lest Claire might have been lost to him, under the influence of others ; and now only three days remained ere he would have to sail for the Rangoon River.

Only three clays !

Lonsdale's khousamen, or butler, had perfumed their dining-room with pastilles, or incense, burned on a broad, flat clhooi ka'sin of cluy, and after a gallop in the cool morning air, clad in a white jacket, round the Esplanade, he had returned fresh and invigorated to breakfast, in Indian fashion, on coffee and a preparation of butter, green chilis, boiled rice, egg and fish, with cayenne at discretion ; while Montressor, pale, unslept, and full of anxious thoughts, contented himself with a chestnut and iced brandy and soda, and sat, almost watch in hand, waiting for the earliest mocyeut whei. .:e could present himself

at Sir Hobart's house, on the Chow-ringher-read.

He was a prey to many anxious thoughts and fpars ; but to these he gave no utterance, even to his old friend Montague Lonsdale, who regarded him with ey«s of sympathy. In the events connected with his separation from Claire, her father's death at Chillington, the conviction that she had been cruelly tricked and degraded, might she not have learned—tutored herself—to loathe him and the very idea of his existence 1 And how, if—believing that she was not Ills wife—she had yielded up her heart to the kindness, the attentions, the love and tenderness of another? And what if there were any truth in all the gossip he had hoard buzzed about her in club-house and bungalow—the result of her beauty, her unprotected aud dependent position in the household of Lady Tremayne ! So, even now she might turn from him as one who knew him not and cared not to know him ; and with this painful idea there came before him the recollection of how she stood when last he saw her, with hands outspread and tremalous as if in deprecation and fear, and face averted, it might be, in horror.

Bufcanon ho knew that this marriage was a fact indisputable ; and that the other was a falsehood, a delusion, an impossibility and a snare. At last the time came.

" Now to be off to Troiaayne's," said he, starting up.

" All right. I'll accompany you ;here, at least," replied Lonsdale. " Qui hi /"

" Kyc hooken, SuJiih ?" —(" what are masters ?") asked his native valet, with alow salaam.

" The horses—quick !"

Eort "Willian, with all its bombproof barracks, its mighty works guarded by mines and counter mine?, its shady groves and deepditch, was soon far in the roar, and a sharp gallop brought the friends to the pillared and chanem-plas-tered villa on the Chowrigher-road, where Lonsdale left Montresaor to his own devices ; and much that follows in plain narrative—the sequel tho story of the latter.

By Sir Hobart, a fussy little man, and his brother, the general, whom Montressor found (here, he was received with mortifying and frigid coolness, the general wearing

what Hilda used to term "his courtmartial face." But ignoring all that, and beseeching their attention, he related his story as we have told it elsewhere, and laid before them the letters and exculpatory documents of his solicitors in Lincoln's Inn Fields, proving that his marriage with " Irene Beaufort," as she called herself, was a snare, and that she was the runaway wife of that personage with the grotesque English name, Mr Tudor Chuckerbutty, comedian, who had asserted his marital fights, in receipt of a due consideration, to which his signature and those of Montressor's solicitors, as witnesses, were appended, On this the clouds were dispersed, and the manner of the general, and of the fussy little governor of Arracou, thawed at once ; and after a little delay Lady Tremayne entered with her whom Montressor had begun to think might never cross his path in this world again.

" Claire, my darling, now you know all—all f he exclaimed, as, tremulous in voice and limb with joy, he held her at arm s length, that he might gaze upon her face, after he had caught he wildly to his breast, and covered it with passionate kisses—kisses from which she did not shrink, though there was still a timid sense of half-for-gotten fear in her heart. Her quivering lips were still white and voiceless ; she had undergone so much. She strove to be calm, and in that calmness her face had something that was indicative of power, of great endurance —a strength of purpose it had never worn before.

" I am now repaid, Claire, a thousand fold, for all I have suffered. And you, my love V asked Mon tressor.

" Had no wish till now but to die," she replied, as her head fell on his breast.

" Oh, let us forget all the misery of the past. Oh, Claire," he whispered, " when I learned to love you, in all the world you were the first and only woman for me—the soul of ray soul- if I may use such a term."

For how many sleepless nights and weary, weary days had Digby's voice lingered in her ears, as she had heard it last in that cottage at Lynemouth, when they parted, pale, haggard, and heart-broken ! " Iα a world where the real and the unreal travel side by side, and the visible and unvisible blend within the consciousness," says a writer, " who would dare to assert what is possible or impossible ?"

Thus strange as it may appear, sudden and unexpected, Montressor and Claire found themselves face to face and re-united, in Calcutta, so many thousand miles from where they had parted last, in that little lonely cottage in Devonshire. With the memory of their brief honeymoon, then so terribly broken and clouded, and when they might have hoped to make up to each other for all the sadness and misery of their apparently hopeless separation, it was hard indeed to lind that the hour was almost at hand when l)igby would have to embark for that pestilential seat of war in Burw.l». "

Without being actually guilty in any way, he, poor fellow, seemed to feel or to be impressed by a keen conviction that he had much to atone for to Clare, in the way of love, devotion and tenderness ; and it was with a natural, but intense reluctance and useless loathing of the service, thxt he now looked forward to the voyage across the Bay of Bengal and the subsequent protracted operations, as they were sure, he thought, to be, in the land of swamps and stockades, all of which would separate them again in the flush of their happy re-union.

On the night before they were to march, Montague Lonsdale, when all was still in Fort William, and nothing seemed to he stirred but the sentries and the mosquitoes, wrote of all these things to Melanie, and his soul seemed to go forth to her with every word, as he sat there alone in the solitude of his plain, bare, and half-mnpty barrack-room. He told her of all his impressions and experiences in Calcutta, of his hopes for the future, lovingly and earnestly, as he knew she would dwell on every word he penned, though perhaps his letter might never get beyond that evil despatchbox of TJnclt! Griii , sliaw. But he knew not of that; he could only suspect as much as he did now.

He sent some farewell gifts, too— Burmese gold bangles and a necklet —for Melanie ; a rare Indian charm in jade—a hideous little god which would ensure health and happiness to the owner, as the Brahmim from whom he bought it averred—as a gift for Eeggie ; a gold whistle by which Dick might summon Bingo ; there was a massive gold coin for Uncle Grimshaw; nor was Amy Brendon, of whose strange story he knew nothing, forgotten by Lonsdale. He made up the whole in a packet with a prayer and a sigh, just as the boom of the morning gun and the peal of the morning bugles rang through the great fort together.

Just then lie thought more of his friend Montressor than himself. To the former, the few short days before his separation from his young wife and his departure had passed like a hurried aivl feverish dream. All was so terribly sudden ; but Claire bore up nobly when, by the light of the almost level sun, amid dense crowds, the gleam of arms, the crash of drums, the dark columns of Sepoys, the white helmetted British Infantry, the quaint Punjaub Mountain Batteries, the glittering staff, the tramp of hoofs and rumble of wheels, the march of the departing columns began. All seemed to whirl strangely, like a phantasmagoria, before her eye?. The grave, loving and earnest face of Montressor appeared at one moment to be close to her own, the next to recede from her ; and then his tender voice seemed to sound faint and far away, as her souses were apparently reeling, and she feared an illness was falling upon her.

" Dear Lady Tremayne, you will guard my darling for me, and keep her till my return, were Ms parting words. Till his return, l'oor Montressor ! A letter from Melanie, -which Lonsdcile had fondly atid desperately hoped might roach him ere now, never came, and lie embarked for Burinah, little knowing that all she had dropped into Uncle Grimshaw's despatch-box wont straight therefrom into the lire, unopened. (To be continued.)