WHO WINS?

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 9494, 25 April 1894, Page 3

WHO WINS?

BY MAY AGNES FLEMING, Author of "Lady Evelyn; or, The Lord of Royal Best," "Magdalen's Vow," "The Unseen Bridegroom," " The Heiress of Glen Gower," " Estella's.Husband," etc., etc. CHAPTER XV.— {ContimedJ Charley delivered this speech in Ma slowest, softest, gentlest tones. The tenanfa of the. Retreat laughed goodnaturedly. " Really, seventeen years old waxes eloquent on the subject. No matter how the result is obtained, so that she result is pretty, eh? The seigneur of Monks wood seems much of your opinion ; he's gone beyond redemption. Do you suppose ho has proposed yet ?" "Can't say. Nob at all unlikely. He's fool enough, in my opinion, for anything, and knave enough for more. But it's no go when he does. She's made up her mind to be Lady Chudlcigh, and Lady Chudleigh she'll be in spite ot fate and Sir Rupert." " Well, she flirts with Trevanion very loudly, at least." " My dear fellow, that pretty little Lady Caprice flirts with everyone. She goes in for Sir Rupert when she gets him alone and unprotected, I'll take my oath, and makes pretty, roundabout, feminine love to him mercilessly. It's the nature of the little animal to flirt. I've seen her, when there was no better quarry to spring, take hold of an older, uglier, sadder, wiser man than Sir Rupert, and soften his brains for him in ten minutes. But it's my opinion, Mr. Angus Macgregor, you know more about her than I do. I cannob gob over that picture, Mrs. Ingram may not be the rose, bub she is very like that splendid flower. I mean your 'rose full of thorns.' I don't want to be imperitnent, but I'll be hanged if I believe you when you say the resemblance is only accidental." " Don't get excited, Charley. Resemblances are common enough. They say I look like Trevanion, you know." "So you do, and yet you don't. You are bearded and there is nothing to be seen of you but a straight nose, two black eyes, and a tremendous frontal development. Our cousin Cyril is the fortunate possessor of a straight noise and two dark eyes, also; but there the resemblance ends. His head tapers up like a sugar-loaf, and his forehead slopes back and contracts at the temples in a way that does not speak flatteringly of the brain behind it. And apropos of that, did you ever notice the insane way he glares, and the galvanic twitches of his face, at times ? He may not be absolutely mad, but, in the elegantly allegorical language of the day, ' his head's not level.'" " Charley," Macgregor said, with some hesitation, "it is a tolerably well-known fact thab your sister used to cherish his memory, to esteem him very highly. Is ib impertinent to ask if she does so still ?" "No," said Charley, decidedly. " Distance lent enchantment to the view. Sybil has been getting disenchanted since the first moment she set eyes upon him. Than little episode of the bull finished him in her estimation. A woman is ready to forgive seventy times seven almost any crime a man can commit; but she won't forgive, if she is any way plucky herself, an act of cowardice. Trevanion showed the white feather horribly that day, and not all the memories of battles fought and won, in India and Russia, can counterbalance the flight from tho bull. He offered some kind of limping apology— illness, nerves, etc.—and my Lady Sybil listened with thab cold, proud face no one can put on to more perfection, and responded by a high and chilling bow. There is a sort of armed peace between them, and she unmistakably despises him for his infatuation aboub the widow. No ; Sybil's hero is Sybil's hero no longer. I rather think you have usurped his place." , The face of Angus Macgregor flushed deep red in tho darkness, but his steady voico was as cool as ever.

" Not at all unlikely. We —brethron of Che pen anil ink-bottle— aro harnns., in the eyes of young ladydora. They read our books ; our dreamy, misty, rather trashy poems ; our sensational novels, full of subterranean passages, sliding panels, mysterious murders, and dashing, slashing, reckless, dauntless, magnificent heroes, with flashing eyes, and raven whiskers, and glittering cimeters, and they picture us gradiose creatures, baring our white brows to the midnight) blasts, and raving, a la Byron, of the perfidy of woman and the baseness" of man. They're disappointed, sometimes, when we suddenly appear before them with Bandy hair and mild blue eyes, a tendency to perpetual blushes, and as insipid as a mug of milk and water. Miss Trevanion is a hero-worshipper of the most approved kind ; and when one topples from his pedestal, she elevates another. Here we are at the Retreat. Thank you, j old fellow, for dropping me, and goodnight." " You dine with us to-morrow., do you not ?" Charley asked. " You promised my mother, I believe. You beat her at whist lasb time, and she is panting for revenge. Until then, aw revoir. Don't dream of the widow ; it's dangerous." Charley whirled away in the darkness, and the author entered his domicile. Very pleasant the lighted windows looked against the rainy blackness of the August night, and very pleasant was the old-fashioned parlour, lighted up with a half-dozen wax tapers. "Dream of the widow I" muttered Macgregor, between his teeth; " widow forsooth ! No, I shall leave thab for—Cyril Trevanion. My faith ! but they both play their little game well I And she'll hunt the baronet down, until she bewitches him into marrying her, if she's let alone. She's J a clever little devil, and I could almosb admire her pluck, in fighting fate to the last and holding her own against such tremendous odds ; but when I think of her living under the same roof, clasping hands, and breaking bread with Sybil Lemox, by—" he swore a deep, stern oath, " I can feel no mercy. My beautiful, pure, proud Sybil! if you only knew what thab woman is, and has been, you would recoil from sight of her as you would from a hooded snake—a deadly cobra. And I thought her dead, and she thinks mo dead, very likely. How tenacious of life venomous reptiles are ! I bolieve Rose Dawson has more lives than a cat. She stood as much ' punishment' from Dawson, before she did for him, as any member of the F.R. in England; she has faced starvation, hanging, sickness ; she has been knocked about like a football, through every corner of the Continent, and she turns up here in the end, handsomer, younger, more elegant, more insolent, in her fadeless beauty, than ever ! Bub clever as you are, and handsome as you are, my little fascinating Rose, I think you have meb your match this time. For fifteen years you have been conqueress ; bub the big wheel spins around, and you on the top go down and I rise up. It's my turn now, and I'll show >ou the same mercy you showed methe mercy you showed thab poor devil, Dawson. I'll spare you no more than I would a raging tigress broken loose from her jungle. I wonder where Lady Lemox picked her up. I'll ascertain bomorrow. Bub first—" He took up the portfolio as he spoke, drew out the water-colour sketch, and with a penknife that lay near cut it up into morsels. He laughed grimly as be flung them out into the rain. "lain afraid you won't seo the picture of that ' wicked dead person' when next we meet, my dear Mrs. Ingram.* And we'll take our masks off at that meeting, and I'll show you that dyed tresses, rouge, pearl-powder, and a splendid toilet cannot change Rose Dawson out of my knowledge." Mr. Macgregor presented himself next day at Trevanion as"the long lances of sunseb were glimmering redly through the brown boles of the oaks and elms, and the atmosphere seemed a rain of impalpable gold-dust). He was looking unutterably patrician in his evening dress—tall, strong as some musoular Apollo going rapidly over the ground with his swinging, soldierly stride, and his Livonian at his heels. For Mr. Macgreeor had been a soldier in early youth—he told Miss Trevanion so one day —had held a commission in a crack cavalry corps, and had served in India. " ._ • ' ■''» "You never knew my cousin there,' Sybil had said, thoughtfully. "It is singular,' too, Colonel Trevanion must have been serving in India about the same time." The queeresb smile came and faded on Colonel Treranion's tenant's face.

"I beg your pardon—l did see your cousin. He saw me, too; bub that unfortunate fever," Macgregor laughed, an inexpressible twinkle in his eye; "don't let us forget that! He left bis memory behind him in South America, as I came near leaving my liver behind me in Calcutta." "You don't believe in that fever, Mr. Macgregor," Sybil said, quickly; " and yet —it is very strange— must be something, you know. Cyril doesn't seem to recognise his oldest friendhe seems to recall no circumstance of the past"—an involuntary glance at her ring—" the old familiar landmarks even appear strange and unknown. It is so very, very odd J Loss of memory must be the reason !" The hermit of the Retreat laughed—a laugh that puzzled and provoked the heiress —and that knowing light in his dark eyes seemed to deepen. "You find your cousin very much changed, then ? Many say that, and — not for the better. Fifteen years is a long time to be an alien and a wanderer, a homeless pariah, with a bitter sorrow and disgrace in the past, and very little in the future to look forward to. Disgraced by a vile woman, an old and honoured name tainted, disowned and disinherited, shut oub from the world in which all that is best and brightest live, faith lost in man and woman, nothing left to wish for but six feet of Indian soil and some friendly bullet— ! Mies Trevanion, fifteen years of that sort of existence is likely to change any man."

Sybil looked at him in surprise. He had begun lightly enough, but he had grown strangely earnest ere he ceased. The handsome bronzed face, too, was a shade paler than its wont. "You speak for Colonel Trevanion very earnestly," she said, *'■ and yet—l beg your pardon—but I fancied there was bibber hate between you two." Once more the author slightly laughed. "Mydear Miss Trevanion,how very subtle your instincts are, or else—how stupidly our faces must show our feelings. We hate each other, we could blow each other's brains out with all the pleasure in life ; bub we don't make scenes in these latter days. We meet and we bow, and the conventional smiles and small talk are in full play; and if we lived in the pleasant ItalianBorgian times wo would invest twenty scudi in a medicated rose or dagger for the man we accost so politely. Why, the vendetta is the style no longer, even in Corsica." " Mr. Macgregor, what has my cousin ever done to you ? Why do you hate him like this?"

" Hate him! I don't hate him, Miss Trevanion; he rather amuses me than otherwise. I find him a most interesting study, and think him the cleverest person I know of. It is the other way—he hates me!"

Beyond this Miss Trevanion could get nothing from Macgregor, and she was too proud bo ask questions. The tenant of the Retreat was almost a daily visitor now at the Park, where Lady Lomox had taken a decided liking to him at once. Indeed, it was hard not to like the agreeable hermit of Monkswood Waste, with his frank, handsome face, his brilliant conversational powers, his universal knowledge of persons and places and things, and the unutterable placidity with which ho allowed my lady to win his shillings at long whist. He played cards a good deal, certainly, and last a great many shillings; but he found time to stand beside the piano also, and turn over Sybil's music, and listen to the full soprano tones rising and falling silvery. In the rich warmth of the August nights, with the ivory moonlight brilliant in the rose gardens and on the lawn, he stood look ing down again and again into the pale, beautiful face, the dark eyes inexpressibly tender and soft and dewy. As he came striding through the long English grass, whistling the " Macgregors' March," he saw a slender, girlish figure on the lawn, a tall figure in floating, misty robes of black, a necklace and cross of jet and gold her only ornament, a spray of white lily-buds twisted in the dark richness of her hair. That willowy figure, with its indescribably proud, high-bred air, was very familiar to the tall Macgregor. It turned at his approach, and the colour arose to the delicate cheeks, and an added light to the lovely violet eyes, as she frankly held out her hand.

"Good-evening, Mr. Macgregor ; mamma has been fidgeting unpleasantly all day for fear you might not come. She likes to utilise her evenings. Cyril, down, sir S? I*Sybil,'1*Sybil,' hold your noisy tongue ! Don'b you know Herr Faustus before this ?" For* Miss Trovanion's poodle and masbiff were making aggressive demonstrations toward the long, lean wolf-hound, who showed his formidable teeth in one long bass growl. "Cyril and Sybil are evidently on the best of terms with each other, at least," Macgregor said, with a glance at their mistress that deepened the carnation ; " and they look upon Doctor Faustus and his master as unwarrantable intruders. Apropos, I met the original Cyril, with Czar, in full gallop, making for his divinity, the most witching of widows. Did he ever read Pickwick, I wonder, and the immortal warniug of the great Weller Miss Trevanion laughed, but rather constrainedly. Cyril Trevanion had been her hero once, her cousin always ; he bore the grand old name, the same blood ran in his veins, and now the merest mention of him made her wince. [To be continued on Saturday next.]