OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY
Cecilia softly dropped her father’s arm, and went into the house. The
exceeding pallor of Beauchamp’s face haunted her in her room. She heard
the controversy proceeding below, and an exclamation of Blackburn
Tuckham’s: “Immorality of meat-eating? What nonsense are they up to
now?”
Beauchamp was inaudible, save in a word or two. As usual, he was the
solitary minority.
But how mournfully changed he was! She had not noticed it, agitated by
her own emotions as she had been, and at one time three parts frozen.
He was the ghost of the Nevil Beauchamp who had sprung on the deck of
the _Esperanza_ out of Lieutenant Wilmore’s boat, that sunny breezy day
which was the bright first chapter of her new life—of her late life, as
it seemed to her now, for she was dead to it, and another creature, the
coldest of the women of earth. She felt sensibly cold, coveted warmth,
flung a shawl on her shoulders, and sat in a corner of her room, hidden
and shivering beside the open window, till long after the gentlemen had
ceased to speak.
How much he must have suffered of late! The room she had looked to as a
refuge from Nevil was now her stronghold against the man whom she had
incredibly accepted. She remained there, the victim of a heart malady,
under the term of headache. Feeling entrapped, she considered that she
must have been encircled and betrayed. She looked back on herself as a
giddy figure falling into a pit: and in the pit she lay.
And how vile to have suspected of unfaithfulness and sordidness the
generous and stedfast man of earth! He never abandoned a common
friendship. His love of his country was love still, whatever the form
it had taken. His childlike reliance on effort and outspeaking, for
which men laughed at him, was beautiful.
Where am I? she cried amid her melting images of him, all dominated by
his wan features. She was bound fast, imprisoned and a slave. Even Mr.
Austin had conspired against him: for only she read Nevil justly. His
defence of Dr. Shrapnel filled her with an envy that no longer maligned
the object of it, but was humble, and like the desire of the sick to
creep into sunshine.
The only worthy thing she could think of doing was (it must be
mentioned for a revelation of her fallen state, and, moreover, she was
not lusty of health at the moment) to abjure meat. The body loathed it,
and consequently the mind of the invalided lady shrank away in horror
of the bleeding joints, and the increasingly fierce scramble of
Christian souls for the dismembered animals: she saw the innocent
pasturing beasts, she saw the act of slaughter. She had actually
sweeping before her sight a spectacle of the ludicrous-terrific, in the
shape of an entire community pursuing countless herds of poor
scampering animal life for blood: she, meanwhile, with Nevil and Dr.
Shrapnel, stood apart contemning. For whoso would not partake of flesh
in this kingdom of roast beef must be of the sparse number of Nevil’s
execrated minority in politics.
The example will show that she touched the borders of delirium.
Physically, the doctor pronounces her bilious. She was in earnest so
far as to send down to the library for medical books, and books upon
diet. These, however, did not plead for the beasts. They treated the
subject without question of man’s taking that which he has conquered.
Poets and philosophers did the same. Again she beheld Nevil Beauchamp
solitary in the adverse rank to the world;—to his countrymen
especially. But that it was no material cause which had wasted his
cheeks and lined his forehead, she was sure: and to starve with him, to
embark with him in his little boat on the seas he whipped to frenzy,
would have been a dream of bliss, had she dared to contemplate herself
in a dream as his companion.
It was not to be thought of.
No: but this was, and to be thought of seriously: Cecilia had said to
herself for consolation that Beauchamp was no spiritual guide; he had
her heart within her to plead for him, and the reflection came to her,
like a bubble up from the heart, that most of our spiritual guides
neglect the root to trim the flower: and thence, turning sharply on
herself, she obtained a sudden view of her allurement and her sin in
worshipping herself, and recognized that the aim at an ideal life
closely approaches, or easily inclines, to self-worship; to which the
lady was woman and artist enough to have had no objection, but that
therein visibly she discerned the retributive vain longings, in the
guise of high individual superiority and distinction, that had thwarted
her with Nevil Beauchamp, never permitting her to love single-mindedly
or whole-heartedly, but always in reclaiming her rights and sighing for
the loss of her ideal; adoring her own image, in fact, when she
pretended to cherish, and regret that she could not sufficiently
cherish, the finer elements of nature. What was this ideal she had
complained of losing? It was a broken mirror: she could think of it in
no other form.
Dr. Shrapnel’s “Ego-Ego” yelped and gave chase to her through the pure
beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets. It hunted
all the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their
heads—her favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.
The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her
bilious. He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the
parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a
consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel. “The very family to
require strong nourishment,” said the doctor.
Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book
and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of
labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world’s weight.
Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp’s track to experience that.
She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.
Homoeopathy, hydropathy,—the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.
Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,
promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have
been so deferential to a diseased mind. Beyond calling her by her
Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of
their new relations together. He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount
Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one
deposited on a mudbank after buffeting the waves. She learnt that her
father had seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her
personal dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal
of her feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her
where she now lay helpless, almost inanimate.
She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a
marriage-day. It told her that she lived and was moving. The fear of
death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than
Cecilia’s shunning of such a day. The naming of it numbed her blood
like a snakebite. Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and,
happily for Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels,
were few and short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming
subjection to him to alarm her.
Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some
sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge,
or at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed. He
was never intrusive, never pressing. He did not vex, because he
absolutely trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself
that she belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon
Beauchamp. With a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a
collection of treatises on diet, classed _pro_ and _con_, and paged and
pencil-marked to simplify her study of the question. They sketched in
company; she played music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it
well. He seemed to feel the beauty of it sensitively, as she did
critically. In other days the positions had been reversed. He
invariably talked of Beauchamp with kindness, deploring only that he
should be squandering his money on workmen’s halls and other hazy
projects down in Bevisham.
“Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and
has actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten
thousand pounds on a single building outside the town, and he’ll have
to endow it to support it—a Club to educate Radicals. The fact is, he
wants to jam the business of two or three centuries into a life-time.
These men of their so-called progress are like the majority of
religious minds: they can’t believe without seeing and touching. That
is to say, they don’t believe in the abstract at all, but they go to
work blindly by agitating, and proselytizing, and persecuting to get
together a mass they can believe in. You see it in their way of
arguing; it’s half done with the fist. Lydiard tells me he left him
last in a horrible despondency about progress. Ha! ha! Beauchamp’s no
Radical. He hasn’t forgiven the Countess of Romfrey for marrying above
her rank. He may be a bit of a Republican: but really in this country
Republicans are fighting with the shadow of an old hat and a cockhorse.
I beg to state that I have a reverence for constituted authority: I
speak of what those fellows are contending with.”
“Right,” said Colonel Halkett. “But ‘the shadow of an old hat and a
cockhorse’: what does that mean?”
“That’s what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.”
“Ah! so; yes,” quoth the colonel. “And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,
that what we’ve grown up well with, powerfully with, it’s base
ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.”
He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he
affirmed of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect
Beauchamp’s interests.
A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement
of the earl’s expectations of a son and heir. The earl wrote to Colonel
Halkett from Romfrey Castle inviting him to come and spend some time
there.
“Now, that’s brave news!” the colonel exclaimed.
He proposed a cruise round by the Cornish coast to the Severn, and so
to Romfrey Castle, to squeeze the old lord’s hand and congratulate him
with all his heart. Cecilia was glad to acquiesce, for an expedition of
any description was a lull in the storm that hummed about her ears in
the peace of home, where her father would perpetually speak of the day
to be fixed. Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing at
wonderful colours of a Western sky: an oblivion of earthly dates and
obligations. What mattered it that there were gales in August? She
loved the sea, and the stinging salt spray, and circling gull and
plunging gannet, the sun on the waves, and the torn cloud. The
revelling libertine open sea wedded her to Beauchamp in that veiled
cold spiritual manner she could muse on as a circumstance out of her
life.
Fair companies of racing yachts were left behind. The gales of August
mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped
at a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon
as they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw
beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting
sea. Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof. As the
Alpine climber claims the upper air, she had the wild sea to herself
through her love of it; quite to herself. It was delicious to look
round and ahead, and the perturbation was just enough to preserve her
from thoughts too deep inward in a scene where the ghost of Nevil was
abroad.
The hard dry gale increased. Her father, stretched beside her, drew her
attention to a small cutter under double-reefed main-sail and small jib
on the _Esperanza’s_ weather bow—a gallant boat carefully handled. She
watched it with some anxiety, but the _Esperanza_ was bound for a Devon
bay, and bore away from the black Dorsetshire headland, leaving the
little cutter to run into haven if she pleased. The passing her was no
event.—In a representation of the common events befalling us in these
times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at
whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect
tense. For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with
Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened
to cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened? Cecilia
gathered it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to her surprise and
pleasure, she found at Romfrey Castle. Her friend Louise received a
letter from Mr. Lydiard, containing a literary amateur seaman’s log of
a cruise of a fifteen-ton cutter in a gale, and a pure literary sketch
of Beauchamp standing drenched at the helm from five in the morning up
to nine at night, munching a biscuit for nourishment. The beautiful
widow prepared the way for what was very soon to be publicly known
concerning herself by reading out this passage of her correspondent’s
letter in the breakfast room.
“Yes, the fellow’s a sailor!” said Lord Romfrey.
The countess rose from her chair and walked out.
“Now, was that abuse of the fellow?” the old lord asked Colonel
Halkett. “I said he was a sailor, I said nothing else. He is a sailor,
and he’s fit for nothing else, and no ship will he get unless he bends
his neck never ’s nearer it.”
He hesitated a moment, and went after his wife.
Cecilia sat with the countess, in the afternoon, at a window
overlooking the swelling woods of Romfrey. She praised the loveliness
of the view.
“It is fire to me,” said Rosamund.
Cecilia looked at her, startled. Rosamund said no more.
She was an excellent hostess, nevertheless, unpretending and simple in
company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp’s name was mentioned
did she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a
shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of
mordant pain.
We will make no mystery about it. I would I could. Those happy tales of
mystery are as much my envy as the popular narratives of the deeds of
bread and cheese people, for they both create a tide-way in the
attentive mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep,
the familiar urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise.
And oh, the refreshment there is in dealing with characters either
contemptibly beneath us or supernaturally above! My way is like a Rhone
island in the summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between
the two forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight
mankind—honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none;
they are actual, yet uncommon. It is the clock-work of the brain that
they are directed to set in motion, and—poor troop of actors to vacant
benches!—the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would
appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them, we are lost: back I
go to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the
habit of listening to my own voice more than is good:—
The burden of a child in her bosom had come upon Rosamund with the
visage of the Angel of Death fronting her in her path. She believed
that she would die; but like much that we call belief, there was a
kernel of doubt in it, which was lively when her frame was enlivened,
and she then thought of the giving birth to this unloved child, which
was to disinherit the man she loved, in whose interest solely (so she
could presume to think, because it had been her motive reason) she had
married the earl. She had no wish to be a mother; but that prospect,
and the dread attaching to it at her time of life, she could have
submitted to for Lord Romfrey’s sake. It struck her like a scoffer’s
blow that she, the one woman on earth loving Nevil, should have become
the instrument for dispossessing him. The revulsion of her feelings
enlightened her so far as to suggest, without enabling her to fathom
him, that instead of having cleverly swayed Lord Romfrey, she had been
his dupe, or a blind accomplice; and though she was too humane a woman
to think of punishing him, she had so much to forgive that the trifles
daily and at any instant added to the load, flushed her resentment,
like fresh lights showing new features and gigantic outlines. Nevil’s
loss of Cecilia she had anticipated; she had heard of it when she was
lying in physical and mental apathy at Steynham. Lord Romfrey had
repeated to her the nature of his replies to the searching parental
questions of Colonel Halkett, and having foreseen it all, and what was
more, foretold it, she was not aroused from her torpor. Latterly, with
the return of her natural strength, she had shown herself incapable of
hearing her husband speak of Nevil; nor was the earl tardy in taking
the hint to spare the mother of his child allusions that vexed her. Now
and then they occurred perforce. The presence of Cecilia exasperated
Rosamund’s peculiar sensitiveness. It required Louise
Wardour-Devereux’s apologies and interpretations to account for what
appeared to Cecilia strangely ill-conditioned, if not insane, in Lady
Romfrey’s behaviour. The most astonishing thing to hear was, that Lady
Romfrey had paid Mrs. Devereux a visit at her Surrey house unexpectedly
one Sunday in the London season, for the purpose, as it became evident,
of meeting Mr. Blackburn Tuckham: and how she could have known that Mr.
Tuckham would be there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was,
Louise assured Cecilia, purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were
present: but the countess obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr.
Tuckham came from it declaring it to have been more terrible than any
he had ever been called upon to endure. The object of the countess was
to persuade him to renounce his bride.
Louise replied to the natural inquiry—“Upon what plea?” with a
significant evasiveness. She put her arms round Cecilia’s neck: “I
trust you are not unhappy. You will get no release from him.”
“I am not unhappy,” said Cecilia, musically clear to convince her
friend.
She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining
her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of
marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her
weep. Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had
been more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over the
deeps, perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her
tears—for Lady Romfrey tasked it very severely: but he from whom she
could hope for no release, gave her some of the firmness which her
nature craved in this trial.
From saying quietly to her: “I thought once you loved him,” when
alluding to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by
degrees on to direct entreaties. She related the whole story of Renée
in England, and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at
Cecilia’s mildness after hearing it. Her hearer would have imagined
that she had no moral sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the
poor lady’s mind was distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp.
Cecilia’s high conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of
our English civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not
explain it. She bowed to Lady Romfrey’s praises of Nevil, suffered her
hands to be wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her
love of him to be wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her
cold resolution to marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In
truth, it was too late to speak of Renée to her now. It did not beseem
Cecilia to remember that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and
while confessing to many errors, because she felt them, and gained a
necessary strength from them—in the comfort of the consciousness of
pain, for example, which she sorely needed, that the pain in her own
breast might deaden her to Nevil’s jealousy, the meanest of the errors
of a lofty soul, yielded no extract beyond the bare humiliation proper
to an acknowledgement that it had existed: so she discarded the
recollection of the passion which had wrought the mischief. Since we
cannot have a peerless flower of civilization without artificial aid,
it may be understood how it was that Cecilia could extinguish some
lights in her mind and kindle others, and wherefore what it was not
natural for her to do, she did. She had, briefly, a certain control of
herself.
Our common readings in the fictitious romances which mark out a plot
and measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful
of the effect of that story of Renée. A wooden young woman, or a
galvanized (sweet to the writer, either of them, as to the reader—so
moveable they are!) would have seen her business at this point, and
have glided melting to reconciliation and the chamber where romantic
fiction ends joyously. Rosamund had counted on it.
She looked intently at Cecilia. “He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he
has lost you—I am the cause!” she cried in a convulsion of grief.
“Dear Lady Romfrey!” Cecilia would have consoled her. “There is nothing
to lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not to blame
for anything: how can you be?”
“I spoke falsely of Dr. Shrapnel; I am the cause. It lies on me! it
pursues me. Let me give to the poor as I may, and feel for the poor, as
I do, to get nearer to Nevil—I cannot have peace! His heart has turned
from me. He despises me. If I had spoken to Lord Romfrey at Steynham,
as he commanded me, you and he—Oh! cowardice: he is right, cowardice is
the chief evil in the world. He is ill; he is desperately ill; he will
die.”
“Have you heard he is very ill, Lady Romfrey?”
“No! no!” Rosamund exclaimed; “it is by not hearing that I _know_ it!”
With the assistance of Louise Devereux, Cecilia gradually awakened to
what was going on in the house. There had been a correspondence between
Miss Denham and the countess. Letters from Bevisham had suddenly
ceased. Presumably the earl had stopped them: and if so it must have
been for a tragic reason.
Cecilia hinted some blame of Lord Romfrey to her father.
He pressed her hand and said: “You don’t know what that man suffers.
Romfrey is fond of Nevil too, but he must guard his wife; and the fact
is Nevil is down with fever. It’s in the papers now; he may be able to
conceal it, and I hope he will. There’ll be a crisis, and then he can
tell her good news—a little illness and all right now! Of course,” the
colonel continued buoyantly, “Nevil will recover; he’s a tough wiry
young fellow, but poor Romfrey’s fears are natural enough about the
countess. Her mind seems to be haunted by the doctor there—Shrapnel, I
mean; and she’s exciteable to a degree that threatens the worst—in case
of any accident in Bevisham.”
“Is it not a kind of cowardice to conceal it?” Cecilia suggested.
“It saves her from fretting,” said the colonel.
“But she is fretting! If Lord Romfrey would confide in her and trust to
her courage, papa, it would be best.”
Colonel Halkett thought that Lord Romfrey was the judge.
Cecilia wished to leave a place where this visible torture of a human
soul was proceeding, and to no purpose. She pointed out to her father,
by a variety of signs, that Lady Romfrey either knew or suspected the
state of affairs in Bevisham, and repeated her remarks upon Nevil’s
illness. But Colonel Halkett was restrained from departing by the
earl’s constant request to him to stay. Old friendship demanded it of
him. He began to share his daughter’s feelings at the sight of Lady
Romfrey. She was outwardly patient and submissive; by nature she was a
strong healthy woman; and she attended to all her husband’s
prescriptions for the regulating of her habits, walked with him, lay
down for the afternoon’s rest, appeared amused when he laboured to that
effect, and did her utmost to subdue the worm devouring her heart but
the hours of the delivery of the letter-post were fatal to her. Her
woeful: “No letter for me!” was piteous. When that was heard no longer,
her silence and famished gaze chilled Cecilia. At night Rosamund eyed
her husband expressionlessly, with her head leaning back in her chair,
to the sorrow of the ladies beholding her. Ultimately the contagion of
her settled misery took hold of Cecilia. Colonel Halkett was induced by
his daughter and Mrs. Devereux to endeavour to combat a system that
threatened consequences worse than those it was planned to avert. He by
this time was aware of the serious character of the malady which had
prostrated Nevil. Lord Romfrey had directed his own medical man to go
down to Bevisham, and Dr. Gannet’s report of Nevil was grave. The
colonel made light of it to his daughter, after the fashion he
condemned in Lord Romfrey, to whom however he spoke earnestly of the
necessity for partially taking his wife into his confidence to the
extent of letting her know that a slight fever was running its course
with Nevil.
“There will be no slight fever in my wife’s blood,” said the earl. “I
stand to weather the cape or run to wreck, and it won’t do to be taking
in reefs on a lee-shore. You don’t see what frets her, colonel. For
years she has been bent on Nevil’s marriage. It’s off: but if you catch
Cecilia by the hand and bring her to us—I swear she loves the
fellow!—that’s the medicine for my wife. Say: will you do it? Tell Lady
Romfrey it shall be done. We shall stand upright again!”
“I’m afraid that’s impossible, Romfrey,” said the colonel.
“Play at it, then! Let her think it. You’re helping me treat an
invalid. Colonel! my old friend! You save my house and name if you do
that. It’s a hand round a candle in a burst of wind. There’s Nevil
dragged by a woman into one of their reeking hovels—so that Miss Denham
at Shrapnel’s writes to Lady Romfrey—because the woman’s drunken
husband voted for him at the Election, and was kicked out of
employment, and fell upon the gin-bottle, and the brats of the den died
starving, and the man sickened of a fever; and Nevil goes in and sits
with him! Out of that tangle of folly is my house to be struck down? It
looks as if the fellow with his infernal ‘humanity,’ were the bad
genius of an old nurse’s tale. He’s a good fellow, colonel, he means
well. This fever will cure him, they say it sobers like bloodletting.
He’s a gallant fellow; you know that. He fought to the skeleton in our
last big war. On my soul, I believe he’s good for a husband.
Frenchwoman or not, that affair’s over. He shall have Steynham and
Holdesbury. Can I say more? Now, colonel, you go in to the countess.
Grasp my hand. Give me that help, and God bless you! You light up my
old days. She’s a noble woman: I would not change her against the best
in the land. She has this craze about Nevil. I suppose she’ll never get
over it. But there it is: and we must feed her with the spoon.”
Colonel Halkett argued stutteringly with the powerful man: “It’s the
truth she ought to hear, Romfrey; indeed it is, if you’ll believe me.
It’s his life she is fearing for. She knows half.”
“She knows positively nothing, colonel. Miss Denham’s first letter
spoke of the fellow’s having headaches, and staggering. He was out on a
cruise, and saw your schooner pass, and put into some port, and began
falling right and left, and they got him back to Shrapnel’s: and here
it is—that if you go to him you’ll save him, and if you go to my wife
you’ll save her: and there you have it: and I ask my old friend, I beg
him to go to them both.”
“But you can’t surely expect me to force my daughter’s inclinations, my
dear Romfrey?”
“Cecilia loves the fellow!”
“She is engaged to Mr. Tuckham.”
“I’ll see the man Tuckham.”
“Really, my dear lord!”
“Play at it, Halkett, play at it! Tide us over this! Talk to her: hint
it and nod it. We have to round November. I could strangle the world
till that month’s past. You’ll own,” he added mildly after his thunder,
“I’m not much of the despot Nevil calls me. She has not a wish I don’t
supply. I’m at her beck, and everything that’s mine. She’s a brave good
woman. I don’t complain. I run my chance. But if we lose the child—good
night! Boy or girl!—boy!”
Lord Romfrey flung an arm up. The child of his old age lived for him
already: he gave it all the life he had. This miracle, this young son
springing up on an earth decaying and dark, absorbed him. This reviver
of his ancient line must not be lost. Perish every consideration to
avert it! He was ready to fear, love, or hate terribly, according to
the prospects of his child.
Colonel Halkett was obliged to enter into a consultation, of a shadowy
sort, with his daughter, whose only advice was that they should leave
the castle. The penetrable gloom there, and the growing apprehension
concerning the countess and Nevil, tore her to pieces. Even if she
could have conspired with the earl to hoodwink his wife, her strong
sense told her it would be fruitless, besides base. Father and daughter
had to make the stand against Lord Romfrey. He saw their departure from
the castle gates, and kissed his hand to Cecilia, courteously, without
a smile.
“He may well praise the countess, papa,” said Cecilia, while they were
looking back at the castle and the moveless flag that hung in folds by
the mast above it. “She has given me her promise to avoid questioning
him and to accept his view of her duty. She said to me that if Nevil
should die she...”
Cecilia herself broke down, and gave way to sobs in her father’s arms.