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Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
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IT was, undoubtedly, a curious coincidence, and though Charlie Calthorpe was by no means superstitious, he could not help feeling that the hand of Fate seemed to have sent this woman his way.
He met her first of all in Monte Carlo on New Year's Day. He had come there from Nice for the first time, with no intent of trying his luck at the tables.
With a vague hope of seeing the attractive unknown again, Charlie Calthorpe haunted the Casino for some days, but he was doomed to be disappointed, and in time he left, and would probably have forgotten all about her but for an adventure which befell him about a year later in Paris.
He was walking in the Bois de Boulogne, when suddenly there was a great clatter of hoofs and a noise of confused shouting, and in that moment a carriage came dashing towards him at a tremendous rate amid a cloud of dust. The noise, the shouting of the servants, the wild mien of the horses, and the furious speed with which they were galloping along showed that the coachman had lost control of them, and they were running away. The situation was extremely critical.
In a moment Charlie Calthorpe made his decision, and then as the foaming, wild-eyed, animals passed him at full speed, with heads erect and heels flung high, he darted out into the road, ran with them for a few yards, and then seized the rein of the near one with an iron grasp.
For a moment there was a desperate struggle between man and beast, but the former held on like grim death, and, throwing all his weight into his hold, wrenched at the horse's mouth with such violence that the pain obliged it to slacken its pace.
This timely relief enabled the coachman to recover his presence of mind and put his strength into the scale, and in a few minutes two raging demons were transformed into a pair of steaming, subdued animals of draught. As Calthorpe turned away to escape the thanks which were showered on him by the occupants of the carriage he heard a voice say quite audibly: "What a brave man!"
He turned at once in the direction of the sound, and to his intense surprise there was the unknown of Monte Carlo. She was seated in a victoria, which had stopped in the road evidently that its occupants—there was also an elderly lady in the conveyance—might satisfy their curiosity. She was leaning forward, and her whole bearing betrayed the utmost interest. Her eyes sparkled, and even as Calthorpe's glance fell on her face her lips closed on the last words of her expression of outspoken admiration.
As their looks met she became confused, and her eyes faltered, and she fell back into her seat. The next moment, in obedience, no doubt, to her orders, the coachman whipped up his horse, and she was gone.
"Lost for the second time," said Calthorpe to himself, giving vent to his disappointment.
He remained in Paris about a week, but though he went every day to the Bois, and spent a good deal of time in visiting principal places of fashionable resort, the mysterious lady was not seen again. She seemed to have vanished like the snows of yester-year.
"By Jove, this is curious when I come to think of it. It was New Year's Day that I saw her first at Monte Carlo, for I remember that we left for England in the first week of January, and now this is New Year's Day again."
"I shall see her again next year on New Year's Day," he said aloud, with an accent of conviction which surprised himself and then made him laugh.
THE year passed amid a variety of amusements—for Calthorpe was a rich man, whose only labours would have seemed amusements to others.
In the natural course of things he would either have gone abroad in the following January or else spent the early part of the month in London. Chance willed it that at the end of December a friend wrote to him from Brighton, asking him to come and stay for a few days, and fixing the day of his arrival on January 1. Calthorpe's first impulse was to refuse, but he changed his mind.
"After all," he thought, "I have decided to be governed by chance. One must give even chance a chance."
The morning of January 1 saw him at Victoria Station. He had scarcely settled himself in his place when there was a confused noise of footsteps on the platform, a guard appeared suddenly at the window, and with a sharp snap the door opened.
"In here, mum," said the guard with that intense respect which suggests the idea of a handsome gratuity, and immediately a tall lady, clothed from head to foot in black, entered the compartment in a great hurry.
Chance had fulfilled her part of the drama, and it was with a curious mixture of surprise and pleasure that Calthorpe recognised the mysterious beauty of Paris and Monte Carlo.
The window seemed to offer a ready opening for attempting a conversation. He pushed the topic gently forward for her approval. She accepted it graciously. Whereupon he deferentially suggested admiration of the landscape. She evinced no hostility to this advance, either. Emboldened by his slight success, he attempted to lead her into longer conversational paths, and she followed him without apparent reluctance. By the time the train had reached Hayward's Heath they were conversing easily on general subjects.
He talked about Monte Carlo.
"I was last there two years ago," he said; "it was early in January."
"We must have been there the same time," she replied readily. "I was there early in January."
"I thought so," he said, as naturally as possible. "I fancy I remember seeing you there on January 1."
A slight movement of surprise elevated her beautifully arched eyebrows.
"You have a good memory," she said, with a smile. "I must plead guilty to not having such a good one. All the same, I must admit that I thought your face was familiar to me when I first entered the train, but it was connected to my mind with a very different place. Once, when I was in Paris, there was a carriage accident. Horses were running away, and would have dashed into us, and probably killed us, when, in the nick of time, they were stopped by brave—"
"Yes," he said, with an excellent assumption of indifference, "it was I. Anyone else would have done the same. And that was January 1 last year."
She cast a hasty glance at the neglected paper which lay on her lap, and then her face assumed an expression of intense bewilderment.
"I thought so," she said. "Is not this a very remarkable coincidence? To-day is the 1st of January."
"I can scarcely imagine that can be merely an accident," he said, quietly. "I think it must mean that our lives are to be connected in some way."
The fair unknown laughed, and, raising her eyes to Calthorpe's face, she scrutinised him keenly. There was an expression of determination and intelligence in the large, grey orbs which quite surprised him. A rapid glance sufficed her, and she lowered them again.
"Tell me," she said, with a short laugh, while she allowed her gaze to wander to the window. "You are going to Brighton, perhaps? Very well; are you going for the day or to stay? Do you know the people there?"
She blushed crimson as she spoke, and the tell-tale colour seemed to reveal to Calthorpe more certainly even than her words that she had decided—well, not to refuse his scarcely veiled petition without further discussion.
"I distrust men," she said at last, with unexpected bitterness. "There is no good in them. What good would there be in—"
She paused for a moment, and then continued, "I think that if my husband—"
The great eyes were turned full on him now, and must have noticed the start with which he received the last word. "I ought to have told you that I am a widow," she added, quietly bending a little towards him; and the young man, undoubtedly, experienced an odd sense of relief at the abrupt termination. "If he had been kinder to me I should not have had such a low opinion of men."
"Did he ill-treat you?" said Calthorpe with ready sympathy.
"Do you know," she said suddenly, and her voice quivered painfully, "that at one time I nearly killed myself to escape from my life?"
He sympathised with her most deeply, and offered her the most soothing words which the heart of man could devise, but he did not omit to chide her gently for her despair. There was a note of earnestness in her voice which would have convinced the most incredulous woman.
They conversed for some time in this intimate strain, and then Calthorpe began to realise that the journey was approaching its end, and he had not yet obtained any definite assurance that the acquaintance would continue. He took advantage of a lull in the conversation to utter his appeal. "We are getting very near Brighton. Is this to be the end of it?"
She hesitated, and then said with the air of a woman who has made up her mind: "I am staying with friends at Brighton, and you cannot see me except by accident. I shall return to London at the end of the week."
She gave him a name and an address in a small street.
"If you like to call any Sunday after five you will find me in."
THIS strangely-formed friendship progressed at a very rapid rate. Very soon Calthorpe discovered that she appreciated bouquets of rare flowers and boxes of Parisian sweets, that she was not averse to receiving even more valuable presents, and had a passion for diamonds; and, as he made it his business to gratify her tastes to the full, hardly a day passed in which she was not indebted to him for some new gratification.
It was true he was not quite so inexperienced as to accept all her statements without endeavouring to discover if there were any other side to the question, but his efforts were vain.
"I lived abroad entirely in my early life and up to quite recently," she said to him one day, almost as if she realised his perplexity.
"Tell me," he said to her at one of the interviews late in the day, which were by that time of daily occurrence, "wasn't that Colonel Travers you were walking with in Piccadilly this afternoon?"
"It may have been"—her tone was far from assured. "I met so many people. I think he was one of them, so far as I can remember. But why do you ask? Do you know him? And where were you? I didn't see you."
"Oh, passed in a hansom. I know you did not see me. You were engaged in talking to him. No; I did not know him, but I know of him."
"I remember now. Yes, we met by accident in Piccadilly. He insisted on turning and walking with me on some pretext. He was a friend of my husband's, but never exactly a friend of mine. I let him walk a few yards with me, and then got into a hansom. What would you have had one do—call the police and make a scene in the street?" She laughed as she finished.
"You could not have acted better," said Calthorpe, his face clearing as if by magic. "And I am so glad to hear that he is not a friend of yours."
"I really don't see," said Mrs. Addison, very distinctly, and she turned the light of her fine eyes full on the speaker, "what business is it of yours who is my friend or not. It is really very impertinent of you to interfere in matters which do not concern you."
They were sitting on the sofa close together in the most intimate way, and at the moment she let her hand fall at her side within an arm's length of his.
"Because I love you," he said passionately taking it, while his other arm passed round her unresisting waist.
Well, and it was done—in such a different way from what he had pictured to himself—but the result was all that could be desired. From her own lips he heard the avowal that she had loved him from the first, and that it would be her ideal of earthly happiness to be his bride.
"And so you see," she said to him later, "the coincidence has fallen at last, for to-morrow, and not to-day is the 1st of January."
Before departing, however, he stipulated that she should satisfy the omen by writing to him, so that he would get his first letter from his affianced wife on the mystic date.
ON the following morning a letter addressed in Flora Addison's well-known hand was brought to Calthorpe early. He tore it open with eager hands. Then a surprise awaited him. The tone of the beginning was so different from what he had expected. It ran:
My Dear Friend,
I have succeeded at last. Congratulate me.
He read on almost mechanically, with a vague sense of wonder at this curious farrago which his fiancée had chosen to write to him.
Then suddenly a chance phrase threw a flood of interpretation on the mystery. He put the letter down, and literally groaned with horror and disgust. Then he addressed himself once more to the task, and read the letter through without stopping.
It was a letter from a thoroughly abandoned woman to her partner in guilt, congratulating herself on her unhoped-for succour in "hooking" a rich man, who was so blindly devoted to her that "it need not make any difference," and they would only "have to be very careful" in the future.
It was almost with a feeling of nausea that the wretched man realised that she must have written to himself and to the other one after the other, and owing to some confusion—or interference of a benign power—have mixed the letters while inserting them in the envelopes. But for that he would have been most egregiously tricked by this fair-seeming harpy, and committed to a union which sooner or later must have proved the curse of his life.
Then he remembered the date, and the fatality which had attended it. The coincidence had avenged itself.
He enclosed the letter without comment in an envelope, and addressed it to her. The next day he left England for a prolonged tour.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.