The Uttermost Farthing | Page 3

anything to spare her.
"There is one person, and one alone," she had said with some decision,
"who must know. I must tell Adèle de Léra--she must have my address,
for I cannot remain without news of my boy a whole week. As for
Tom"--she had flushed, and then gone on steadily--"Tom will believe
that I am going to stay with Adèle at Marly-le-Roi, and my letters will
be sent to her house. Besides," she had added, "Tom himself is going
away, to England, for a fortnight."
To the man then walking by her side, and even now, as he was
remembering it all, the discussion was inexpressibly odious. "But do
you think," he had ventured to ask, "that Madame de Léra will consent?
Remember, Peggy, she is Catholic, and what is more, a pious Catholic."
"Of course she won't like it--of course she won't approve! But I'm
sure--in fact, Laurence, I know--that she will consent to forward my
letters. She understands that it would make no difference--that I should
think of some other plan for getting them. Should she refuse at the last
moment--but--but she will not refuse--" and her face--the fair,
delicately-moulded little face Vanderlyn loved--had become flooded
with colour.
For the first time since he had known her, he had realised that there was
a side to her character of which he was ignorant, and yet?--and yet
Laurence Vanderlyn knew Margaret Pargeter too well, his love of her
implied too intimate a knowledge, for him not to perceive that
something lay behind her secession from an ideal of conduct to which
she had clung so unswervingly and for such long years.

During the four days which had elapsed between then and now,--days
of agitation, of excitement, and of suspense,--he had more than once
asked himself whether it were possible that certain things which all the
world had long known concerning Tom Pargeter had only just become
revealed to Tom Pargeter's wife. He hoped, he trusted, this was not so;
he had no desire to owe her surrender to any ignoble longing for
reprisal.
The world, especially that corner of Vanity Fair which takes a frankly
materialistic view of life and of life's responsibilities, is shrewder than
we generally credit, and the diplomatist's intimacy with the Pargeter
household had aroused but small comment in the strange polyglot
society in which lived, by choice, Tom Pargeter, the cosmopolitan
millionaire who was far more of a personage in Paris and in the French
sporting world than he could ever have hoped to be in England.
To all appearance Laurence Vanderlyn was as intimate with the
husband as with the wife, for he had tastes in common with them both,
his interest in sport and in horseflesh being a strong link with Tom
Pargeter, while his love of art, and his dilettante literary tastes, bound
him to Peggy. Also, and perhaps above all, he was an American--and
Europeans cherish strange and sometimes fond illusions as to your
American's lack of capacity for ordinary human emotion.
He alone knew that his tie with Mrs. Pargeter grew, if not more
passionate, then more absorbing and intimate as time went on, and he
was sometimes, even now, at considerable pains to put the busybodies
of their circle off the scent.
But indeed it would have required a very sharp, a very keen, human
hound to find the scent of what had been so singular and so innocent a
tie. Each had schooled the other to accept all that she would admit was
possible. True, Vanderlyn saw Margaret Pargeter almost every day, but
more often than not in the presence of acquaintances. She never came
to his rooms, and she had never seemed tempted to do any of the
imprudent things which many a woman, secure of her own virtue, will
sometimes do as if to prove the temper of her honour's blade.

So it was that Mrs. Pargeter had never fallen into the ranks of those
women who become the occasion for even good-natured gossip. The
very way in which they had, till to-night, conducted what she, the
woman, was pleased to call their friendship, made this which was now
happening seem, even now, to the man who was actually waiting for
her to join him, as unsubstantial, as likely to vanish, mirage-wise, as a
dream.
And yet Vanderlyn passionately loved this woman whom most men
would have thought too cold to love, and who had known how to
repress and tutor, not only her own, but also his emotions. He loved her,
too, so foolishly and fondly that he had fashioned the whole of his life
so that it should be in harmony with hers, making sacrifices of which
he had told her nothing in order that he might surround her--an
ill-mated, neglected wife--with a