ON THE BRINK.
Major Gordon left Pevenshall by the mail, and on the following morning
Cecil bade adieu to her friend, who was rather inclined to resent her
abrupt departure.
"I don't believe a bit in Mr. O'Boyneville's summons," said Flo; "you
are tired of us, and you want to go away, Cecil; you are deceiving
me just as you deceived me before. However, of course I cannot keep
you here against your will; and I can only regret that we have not
succeeded in making you happy."
Whereupon Cecil declared that Pevenshall was all that is delightful;
and that she should never forget Mrs. Lobyer's kindness and affection.
The impulsive Florence would upon this have embraced her friend; but
Cecil drew herself away from the embrace.
"Wherever you go, dear, I shall remember you and your goodness," she
said; "and oh, Florence, I hope you will be happy."
As the two women stood for a moment holding each other's hands, and
looking in each other's faces, Cecil would fain have uttered some
word of warning to the friend she never thought to see again. But she
remembered what a mockery any warning must seem hereafter from her
tainted lips; though who so well as this poor shipwrecked creature,
newly foundered on a rock, could tell of the dangers that beset a
woman's pathway? Holding Mrs. Lobyer's hand silently in her own, she
fancied how her friend would remember that parting when her own name
had become a byword and reproach.
"Will she have any pity upon me, I wonder, for the sake of our past
friendship; or will she be as merciless as the rest of the world?"
This is what Cecil thought in that parting moment, while her packages
were being put in the carriage, and the imperturbable footman attended
with her shawls and parasols.
"You will come to us at Christmas," cried Flo.
"I fear not, dear. Good-bye."
Cecil was seated in the carriage in the next minute, waving her hand to
Florence, and a little group of young ladies who had placed themselves
at the hall-door to witness her departure. Splendid Pevenshall swam
before her in a mist as she looked at that group of light-hearted girls
fluttering like a cluster of butterflies in the morning sunshine.
"I shall never again pass the threshold of such a house," she thought.
All through the homeward journey, she felt like a traveller in a
dream. She sat in a corner of the carriage with her eyes fixed upon
the changing landscape; but she saw only a confusion of undulating
corn-fields and summer verdure.
She went mechanically through the business of her arrival, and reached
Brunswick Square without accident; but the clamour of the London
streets sounded in her ears like the booming of a stormy sea.
An unearthly quiet seemed to pervade the Bloomsbury Mansion. The
respectful Pupkin uttered some faint exclamation of surprise on
beholding his mistress; but beyond this Cecil heard neither voice nor
sound. She avoided her own apartments while they were being prepared
for her reception, and went straight to the drawing-rooms, where every
thing remained exactly as she had left it five or six weeks before. The
birds set up a feeble rejoicing as they recognised their mistress; but
she did not approach the window where their cages hung in the London
sunshine.
She looked at her watch; her life to-day was a question of hours.
She had her packing to accomplish--a painful kind of packing, for it
involved the setting aside of every trinket her husband had ever given
her. She intended to take with her only the plainest dresses and the
absolute necessaries of her toilet; she doubted whether even these
things could be really hers when once she crossed the threshold of
that house. There seemed to be a kind of dishonesty in taking with
her the most insignificant trifle that had been bought with Laurence
O'Boyneville's money.
There was one task before Lady Cecil even more painful than the
preparations for her journey, and that task was the writing of the
letter which should tell Mr. O'Boyneville that his wife had decided
on leaving him. How could she do it? how could she put her wickedness
into words? what could she say to him? "You have never been unkind
to me; I have no accusation to bring against you; you have only been
unsympathetic; and a man whom I love better than truth and honour has
persuaded me to abandon you."
Never in all her life had Cecil suffered such anguish as the writing of
that letter cost her. It seemed a cold, hard, cruel letter when it was
written, so curtly did it announce her guilty design; but though there
was little trace of feeling in the written lines, the slow tears rolled
down her pallid cheeks as she wrote, and her hand trembled so violently
that it was with difficulty she could make her writing legible.
"Oh Hector!" she cried piteously; "if you could know what I suffer for
your sake--for your sake!"
Somehow or other the letter was written, sealed, and addressed; and
then she sat looking at it in a kind of stupor.
"If it were really not too late--if I dared ask him to release me," she
thought.
But in the next moment she remembered the solemn nature of her promise,
the sacrifice her lover had made to win it.
"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried; "it is too late! I am bound to him by my
promise."
And then she asked herself whether, if there had been no such promise,
she could have remained in that house as Laurence O'Boyneville's wife.
She had wronged him so much in word and in thought, that her innocence
of deeper and more irrevocable wrong seemed to be of little moment.
Could she look in his face without humiliation? Could she accept his
confidence without dishonour? No! a thousand times no; and this being
so, she was no wife for him.
"Come what may, I must leave my husband," she thought. "Oh, if I could
go alone! if I could only go away by myself to some quiet hiding-place,
and never be heard of any more!"
She thought this in all sincerity. Her love for the tempter had been
in a great measure annihilated by the horror of the temptation. The
sense of her guilt was so great an agony that there was little room in
her mind for any other feeling. It seemed as if the current of Fate
was drifting her along, and that she was no more than a weed, carried
onward by an impetuous torrent. She knew that destruction lay before
her; but she had no power to resist the force of the stream.
After the writing of the letter, she sat for some time in a listless
attitude, looking vacantly at the envelope with her husband's name upon
it. Her head ached with a dull pain, and there was confusion in her
thoughts. She could not ponder deliberately upon the step that she was
going to take. This inability to think quietly had possessed her ever
since she had arrived at the fatal conclusion to which her lover had
urged her. She had accepted the doctrine of necessity; she had allowed
herself to be persuaded that it was her destiny to do wrong; and once
having yielded to this unnatural creed, the false god she had created
was stronger than herself, and she became indeed a powerless creature
in the hands of Fate.
Apollo had spoken; sorrow and shame lay before her, her inevitable
portion.
The day crept on, and she knew that with every hour the current that
was drifting her gathered new strength. Hector was to devote this day
to the settlement of his own affairs; for a man has need to make some
little preparation on the eve of an exile that may last his lifetime.
The day crept on--a dull sultry day at the close of August--and still
Cecil kept her listless attitude by the table with her husband's
letter lying before her. She knew that she was not to expect any visit
from Hector until late in the afternoon, since the business he had to
transact would occupy the best part of his day. But though she was
lonely and wretched, she felt no eagerness for his coming. What relief
or consolation could he bring her? What was he but her accomplice in
wrong, with whom she had plotted a crime, and to whom she was pledged
for the due accomplishment of that evil deed?
Amid the many thoughts that succeeded one another in the confusion of
her brain, there was the thought that guilty wretches who had plotted
the details of a murder must feel very much as she felt to-day. She
could fancy them, when all had been planned, and the hour appointed,
waiting in weary idleness for the time to come. She could fancy them
watching the slow hands upon the dial, and wishing either that time
could come to a dead stop for ever and ever, or that the hour had
arrived and the deed were done. The stillness of the house seemed to
her like the stillness that precedes death and horror. She fancied her
husband coming home from his journey in a day or two to find the same
dull quiet in the house, and his wife's letter waiting for him on the
table.
"If he loved me, the blow would kill him," she thought; "but he does
not love me. His profession is all the world to him. If he had loved
me, I think it would have been easy for me to confess my wickedness
and ask his forgiveness. He will be sorry, perhaps,--more sorry for
me than for himself,--but his grief will not last long. He will have
Westminster Hall, and his hope of getting into Parliament. He is not
like Hector; he would never have allowed his love for me to interfere
with his career."
It was nearly five o'clock when she aroused herself from this miserable
apathy and went to her room to begin the preparations for to-morrow's
flight. She was to dine at half-past six, so she had brief leisure for
her work. One by one she set aside the jewels that her husband had
given her. They were not very numerous, but they were valuable, and in
a simple taste that did credit to Mr. O'Boyneville's judgment.
Like that wretched wife in Kotzebue's tragedy, Lady Cecil could not
fail to remember the occasion on which each gift had been presented.
The emerald-and-diamond bracelet on her birthday; the cameos in
Etruscan setting on the anniversary of her marriage; the suite of
turquoise rings and bracelets in solid bands of lustreless gold,
bestowed upon her in commemoration of some professional triumph of Mr.
O'Boyneville's, as grand in its way as Erskine's defence of Hardy. The
thought of her husband's quiet pleasure in these offerings came back to
her as she touched them.
"I think he must have loved me then," she murmured, as she remembered
the evening on which he had taken the case of cameos from his pocket
to lay it on the little table by which she sat at work. He had loved
her a little at that time, she thought! he had loved her a little when
he sought her as his wife; but always with that moderate and negative
affection for which alone there is room in the breast of a man who
devotes himself to an arduous profession. It had not been given to
Cecil to understand the possibility of hidden fires burning steadily
beneath the dull outward crust of the working man's nature. She did
not know the capacity for deep and passionate feeling which may exist
in the nature of a man whose daily labour leaves him no leisure for
the revelation of the better and brighter part of his mind. She had
expected to find a husband only an improved edition of a lover; and
finding him something altogether different--a creature who accepted her
affection as a matter of course, and was disagreeably candid on the
subject of an unbecoming bonnet,--she concluded all at once that she
was no longer beloved, and that her life was desolate.
The dismal dinner-hour had arrived by the time she had collected the
trinkets in her jewel-case, and had packed two or three dresses and her
most indispensable possessions in the one trunk which she was to take
with her. She went to the dining-room, and made a miserable pretence
of dining, with the inestimable Pupkin in attendance, and the evening
sunlight shining into the dingy pictures on the wall opposite to her.
Every thing in Brunswick Square looked unspeakably dull and faded and
dusty after the splendour of Pevenshall. She thought of the moonlit
terrace, and the fair summer landscape sanctified by the night. The
very tones of Hector Gordon's passionate pleading came back to her
ears; but they moved her with no answering thrill of passion; her
love had perished in the misery which it had brought upon her. She
thought of that little village in Brittany which he had described to
her so eloquently; the rustic retreat in which they were to spend the
first few months of their union--oh God, what a union! A vague horror
was mingled even with the thought of that pine-clad mountain and the
purple sea. Her lover had dwelt so fondly on the beauty of the scene;
and yet, in Brunswick Square, with the summer sunshine coming to her
on a slanting column of dust, and with a street-organ droning in the
distance, she thought of that far-away paradise with a shudder. In
this crisis of her fate, she felt like a creature standing between two
lives--the dull slow river of commonplace existence; the stormy ocean
of passion and guilt. She looked backward to the river with a vague
yearning; she looked forward to the ocean with an unutterable fear.
The shadowy banquet occupied less than half an hour, and it was only
seven o'clock when Cecil went back to the drawing-room. Seven: he would
be with her soon! He too would have made his pretence of dining, no
doubt, at one of his clubs. The crisis in a well-bred man's fate must
be desperate indeed when he abandons that pretence of dining, or faces
the universe with a reckless toilet. Seven. The windows were open; the
canaries were making a discordant scraping with their beaks against
the wires of the cages, and noisy children were emerging from the
square. Cecil looked down at them from her window, and remembered the
stories she had heard of women who had run away from such households
as those. She remembered one especial history,--the wretched story of
a woman who abandoned her husband and children under the influence of
an infatuation which remained an unsolvable mystery to the last. It
was from Brighton that the hapless creature took flight; and she told
one of the few friends who remained to her after that time, how at the
last, just as she had crossed the threshold of her husband's house,
she heard, or fancied that she heard, a cry from one of her children,
and would have gone back--would at that ultimate moment have repented
and returned--if a cruel wind had not closed the door in her face, and
set the seal upon her doom. She had not the courage to ring the bell.
She went away to keep her tryst with the man who had made himself her
master and to have her name a byword and reproach for ever after that
fatal day.
The wheels of an impetuous hansom ground against the curb-stone while
Lady Cecil stood at the window thinking of this dismal story; and her
lover alighted from the vehicle. He stopped to pay the driver--he
must have paid the driver even if he had been going to assist in the
execution of a murder--and the man drove away slowly through the smoky
summer gloaming, contented with his fare.
Cecil was still standing by the window when Pupkin announced Major
Gordon: she turned her head and waited for her lover; and even in that
moment of waiting, as he came towards her through the twilit room, she
thought how different would have been her greeting of him, if she had
been his wife--if she had had any right to be glad of his coming.
"My own darling!" said Hector, in a low tender voice.
She gave him her hand in silence, and he stood by her side in the
window, holding the poor cold hand, and looking down at her with
unutterable affection.
"My own dear girl, how pale you are in this dim light! I hope it is the
light, and that you are not really looking so ill as I fancy you look.
I have done every thing, dear. I have seen the lawyers, the bankers,
the stockbrokers, every body; and am free to go to the end of the
world,--to the very end of the world! look up, darling; let me see the
face I used to dream of on my way back to India, after our parting at
Fortinbras."
She lifted her head from its drooping attitude and looked at him with a
countenance in which there was a mournful resignation that sent a chill
to his heart.
"Oh my darling, if you could only look forward as happily to our future
as I do; I know that there is much for you to suffer--just at first;
but when once we are clear of England, and all the brightest countries
in the universe are before us, the miserable past will fade away like a
dream."
"Do you think so, Hector? Shall I ever forget--shall I ever forget?"
"Let it be considered my fault if you remember. I charge myself with
the happiness of your life. You cannot blame me too bitterly if you are
unhappy. And now, darling, let us discuss our plans for the last time.
I hope they won't bring us lights. It is so nice to sit in this dreamy
twilight. I shall always think tenderly of Brunswick Square, for the
sake of this one evening, Cecil."
They sat by the open window, and Hector talked about the future. He
talked about the future, which, by his showing, was to be one long
idyl; and while he talked, the woman who sat by his side would fain
have cast herself at his feet, crying:
"Release me from my guilty promise! Have pity upon me, and set me free!"
She would fain have done this, but she sat by his side and listened
quietly to hopeful words that jarred strangely with the dull anguish
which had possessed her all through the long wretched day.
They were still sitting in the summer dusk, when a firmer footstep than
Pupkin's sounded on the landing-place, and the door suddenly opened.
"Laurence!" cried Cecil, starting to her feet, as she recognised the
stalwart figure in the doorway.
It was indeed Mr. O'Boyneville, with the dust of travel upon him.
He took his wife in his arms and kissed her tenderly; and he gave
friendly greeting to Major Gordon, but he did not offer his hand to
that gentleman.
"Pupkin told me of your return," he said to Cecil; "what brought you
back so unexpectedly?"
It was some moments before Cecil answered, and even then she could not
reply without hesitation.
"I was so tired of Pevenshall."
"Tired of Pevenshall! I thought you were enjoying yourself so much
there. Well, dear, you were quite right to come back if you were tired.
Let us have the lights, and some tea."
The barrister went to the fireplace to ring one of the bells. He
happened to choose the bell nearest that angle of the chimneypiece on
which Cecil had placed two sealed envelopes addressed to her husband.
One contained the letter announcing her flight; the other the key of
her jewel-case and wardrobe. Mr. O'Boyneville's piercing gaze alighted
on these letters as he rang the bell.
"For me?" he asked, advancing his hand towards the two packets.
"No!" Cecil cried eagerly; "they are mine."
She snatched them from the mantelpiece and put them in her pocket, and
then she seated herself by the table on which she was wont to make tea.
Mr. O'Boyneville walked slowly up and down the room. Major Gordon kept
his place by the open window. Nothing could be more inconvenient than
this unlooked-for return of the barrister, which in all probability
would interfere with the arrangements of the next day. The Major felt
all the degradation of his position, but was determined to hold his
ground nevertheless. The barrister would most likely retire to his
study directly after tea, and thereby afford Hector the opportunity of
speaking to Cecil before he left. There was an unspeakable dreariness,
a palpable desolation in that Bloomsbury drawing-room, which oppressed
Hector Gordon as he stood by the window, looking sometimes out into
the square where the lamps burned dimly in the grey evening light,
sometimes into the dusky room, where the barrister's figure loomed
large athwart the shadows. Cecil sat in a listless attitude, waiting to
perform that simple house-hold duty which must seem such a mockery to
her to-night. The lamps came presently, and the big plated tea-tray and
old-fashioned urn, with impossible lion-heads holding rings in their
mouths. The light of the lamps was painfully dazzling to her aching
eyes. She began to pour out the tea mechanically, and the two men came
to the table to take their cups from her hands. As they stood side by
side doing this, the thought arose in her mind of that one treason
which stands alone amongst all the treasons of mankind; and the figure
of her lover bending over the cups and saucers blended itself horribly
with the image of Judas Iscariot dipping his hand into the dish.
Mr. O'Boyneville drank his tea after his usual absent-minded fashion,
staring into space as he slowly sipped the beverage. He rose after
emptying his second cup and began to pace the room again, while Hector
sat near the lamp-lit table watching Cecil with anxious earnest eyes.
"You scarcely expected me to-night, I suppose, Cecil?" said the
barrister.
"No; I did not expect you."
"I didn't think I should return so soon; but the business I am involved
in just now is a very serious one."
"Indeed!"
She spoke mechanically, feeling herself called upon to speak. Hector
did not even affect any interest in Mr. O'Boyneville's conversation. A
kind of sullenness had taken possession of him since the barrister's
entrance; and he kept his place silently with a dogged determination to
remain, knowing all the time that he had no right to be there, and that
Cecil's husband had good reason to wonder at his presence.
"Yes; it is a very unpleasant business--a painful business. Of course I
have only to consider the technicalities involved in it. I am consulted
on a question that has arisen respecting a marriage-settlement; but
when people want a counsel's opinion, they are obliged to tell him
other things besides technicalities. I am very sorry for the poor
woman."
"What poor woman?" asked Cecil; still because she felt herself obliged
to appear interested.
"The poor deluded creature who has left her husband."
If a thunderbolt had fallen through the roof of Mr. O'Boyneville's
house, Cecil could scarcely have experienced a greater shock; but she
gave no utterance to her feelings. She sat pale and motionless, like
some unhappy wretch at a bar of justice waiting the awful sentence.
"Ah, I forgot," said the barrister; "you don't know the story. As I
said just now, it's not a pleasant story, and perhaps I ought not to
talk to you about it; but I can't get it out of my head. And yet it's
common enough, Heaven knows; only it seems a little worse in this case
than usual, for the husband and wife had lived so happily together."
"Why did she leave him?"
This time it seemed to Cecil as if some unknown force within her
compelled the question, so painful was the nature of her husband's
conversation, so unwilling would she have been to continue it had she
possessed the power of bringing it to an end.
"Why did she leave him?" repeated the barrister. "Who can tell? There
are women in Bethlehem Hospital who believe themselves to be queens of
England, and there are miserable creatures in the same asylum who have
murdered families of helpless children in sudden paroxysms of madness;
but not one amongst them all could seem to me more utterly mad than
this woman."
"You know the husband?" said Hector Gordon. He had risen during the
barrister's discourse and was standing by the mantelpiece. He felt
himself in a manner called upon to take some part in this discussion,
and to defend the sinners if necessary.
"Yes; I know the husband."
"Was he so devoted to his wife?"
"I am not quite sure of your idea of devotion. You see, you are a
club-man, Major Gordon; you belong to the West-end and to a set of
men who can afford to be what you call 'devoted.' I don't suppose you
could realise the idea of a stockbroker's affection for his wife. Your
City-man has very little opportunity for playing the ideal lover or
the ideal husband. His wife's image may be with him even on 'Change.
The details of his business are dry and dull and sordid in the eyes
of other people; but he may be working for his wife all the time, and
his existence may be more completely consecrated to her welfare and to
her happiness than if he dawdled by her side all day on the margin of
some romantic Italian lake, and only opened his lips to protest the
singleness of his affection. Yes, Major Gordon, the City-man's devotion
is the nobler; for it takes the form of unremitting toil and unending
care, while the dawdler's love is only a shallow pretext for a sensuous
laziness amidst beautiful scenery."
"I confess myself sceptical on the subject of your stockbroking
Romeo," said Hector with a sneer. "With that sort of man a wife is
only a superior kind of housekeeper. I don't believe in the poetry of
Bartholomew Lane. Your City-man works hard because money-making is his
habit, his vice, like dram-drinking; not because he wants to make a
fortune for his wife and children."
"You think so?"
"Most assuredly I think so."
"And you do not believe that your hard-working man has his own bright
picture of an ideal home always before his mind? I don't think you
can have studied the habits of Englishmen, Major Gordon, or you
would understand the City-man better. Look about you, and behold the
incarnation of English prosperity in the Englishman's home. It is
for that he works. It is in order to achieve that luxurious haven
that he wastes the best years of his life in the smoke and dust and
heat and turmoil of the commercial battle-ground. And what does his
home represent, with all its splendour of pictures and furniture,
and gardens and stables, but his devotion to his wife and children?
Build what palace he may, his clubs will give him better rooms
than he can build for himself. Whatever salary he pays his cook,
there will be better cooks at the Reform or the London Tavern. But
the hard-working Englishman wants a home; a dining-room in which
his children may gather around him as he sips his famous claret; a
drawing-room where, amidst all the splendour, there will be a corner
for his wife's workbasket, a hiding-place for his baby's last new
toy. And you eloquent drones of the West-end see this poor working
bee--this dust-begrimed money-grub--and you say such a creature cannot
know what it is to love his wife; and if the wife happens to be a
pretty woman, you have neither pity nor respect for the husband. Poor,
miserable, money-earning machine, what is he that he should be pitied
or respected? It can be no sin to bring ruin and desolation upon such a
creature's home."
"You are eloquent to-night, Mr. O'Boyneville."
"Oh, you know it is my trade to be eloquent about other people's
business. I really do feel for this poor man. I have been in his house
to-day: such a house--I could have fancied there had been a funeral,
and that the coffin had only just been taken away; there was such
palpable desolation in the place."
"And the husband," asked Cecil, with real interest this time, "was he
sorry?"
"Sorry! Can you fancy the sorrow for a loss which is so much worse than
death that it would be happiness to the mourner it he could awake from
a dream to find his wife's coffin by his side? Sorry! Do you know what
a broken life is? I do, Cecil. There are three lives ruined and broken
by a woman's folly."
"Let the man who loves her bear the full burden of his guilt," said
Hector eagerly. "Let him be responsible for the issue."
"God help him, poor creature!" cried the barrister.
"You pity him?"
"How can I help pitying him? You read of such a case in the papers, and
think perhaps that the seducer is a very fine fellow. He has persuaded
a silly woman to make her name a public disgrace, and he has destroyed
an honest man's existence. All that sounds very heroic. People wonder
what diabolical charm the villain possessed. There are piquant
paragraphs about him in the papers: a social leader holding him up to
the execration of the million, but with a little flourish of poetry and
passion for his glorification notwithstanding; and if his photograph
could be published while his misdeeds had the gloss of novelty upon
them, it would sell by thousands. But have you ever thought about the
lives of these people after the nine-days' wonder is over, and they
slip out of the public mind? Then comes the chastisement: then comes
the old classic retribution: evil for evil, evil for evil. The man who
did not scruple to destroy the entire scheme of another man's existence
finds his own life wasted and broken. What is the universe for him
henceforward?--a solitude, with the one wretched creature whom he has
chosen for his companion."
"There can be no such thing as solitude with the woman he loves."
"The man who outrages honour and defies society will find his home
something worse than a solitude--a prison, in which two galley-slaves
pace to and fro, dragging at the hateful chain that links them
together. Let the seducer love his victim never so fondly, the time
too surely comes in which he learns to hate her. The time comes
when the voice of a forgotten ambition reminds him how much he has
sacrificed--for what? for the pale face of a penitent, whose wan eyes
are filled with involuntary tears at the sight of the humblest peasant
woman walking by her husband's side."
"A man must be a dastard who could count any sacrifice made for the
woman he loves," said the Major.
"The man who steals another man's wife is a dastard," answered Mr.
O'Boyneville. "Sooner or later he will count the cost of his folly; and
the woman who has staked her salvation against the love of this one
creature will awake some day to find that the game is lost. She will
see the reflection of her own remorse in her lover's face, blended with
something worse than remorse. She will watch his dreary, purposeless
life, spent in a foreign country, under a false name most likely; and
she will think what he might have been but for her. Heaven help her!
She must have a servile love of life for its own sake if she does not
creep quietly from the house some dusky evening to drown herself in
the nearest river. Nothing but her death can set her lover free; and
even her death cannot extinguish the disgrace she has inflicted on her
husband's name."
A half-stifled sob sounded through the room as the barrister came to
a full stop. He went to his wife and found her crying, with her hands
clasped before her face.
"Forgive me, my dear," he said gently; "I forgot that this sort of
story was not the thing to speak of before you. I let myself talk as
if I were in court.--Why are you going away, Major? my wife will be
better presently. We won't say any thing more about these miserable
runaways.--Look up, Cecil. There, you are all right now.--Must you
really go?"
This question was addressed to Hector, who had taken up his hat, and
was waiting to make his adieux.
"Yes; it is ten o'clock. I will call upon Lady Cecil to-morrow. I--I
have something particular to say to her."
"Then I'm afraid that you must defer the something particular for a
week or two. I'm going to take my wife to Devonshire by an early train
to-morrow. Good-night; but I'm coming down to my study, so I can let
you out myself."
"Good-night, Lady Cecil."
"Good-night."
The words were scarcely audible. She rose as she gave him her hand,
and they stood for a few moments face to face, while Mr. O'Boyneville
walked towards the door; Hector mutely imploring some sign, Cecil
looking at him with a blank stupefied expression. To leave her thus,
and on such a night--the night which was to have been the eve of a
new life--was unspeakable anguish. But he had no alternative; the
barrister's eye was upon him; and a word, a look might have betrayed
the woman he loved. He had no opportunity to ascertain whether
to-morrow's appointment at the railway-station was to be kept, or
whether Mr. O'Boyneville's return was to hinder Cecil's flight. He
could only take his departure after the fashion of the most commonplace
visitor, and must trust all to-morrow's schemes and to-morrow's hopes
to the chapter of accidents.
"Good-night, Lady Cecil," he repeated; and he tried to put as much
meaning into those two words as can be infused into any two syllables
of the English language.
Mr. O'Boyneville conducted his guest to the street door, and lingered
on the threshold with him a few moments talking pleasantly.
"You really think of going to the West of England to-morrow?" asked
the Major. There is no such thing as honour when a man is engaged in
a dishonourable cause; and not being able to talk to the wife, Hector
Gordon was fain to extract the information he required from the husband.
"Yes," answered Mr. O'Boyneville; "I have business in that part of the
country; and as my wife is not looking well, I shall take her with me.
A week or two at Clovelly, or some sea-coast village will set her up."
"Shall you start early?"
"Yes; by the eight-o'clock train."
Half-past eight was the hour for the Dover mail, and at a quarter-past
Cecil and Hector were to have met at the station. All had been planned
by the Major. She was to have told her servants that she was going
into Hampshire to join her aunt, and was to have ordered a hack-cab to
take her to the station. All had been thought of; but now delay was
inevitable, and Hector had a presentiment that in this case delay meant
the ruin of his hopes. He bade good-night to the barrister, and went
away from the quiet Bloomsbury quarter with a heavy heart.
Mr. O'Boyneville smiled as he closed the door upon the departing
visitor. "Thank God it's all over so quietly!" he muttered to himself.
"It was best to take matters coolly. It would always have been open to
me to blow his brains out."
The barrister did not go to his study: he went back to the
drawing-room, where he found his wife lying prostrate on the spot
where Hector Gordon had bade her adieu. He lifted her in his arms, and
carried her up stairs as easily as if she had been an infant.
He rang for one of the maids to attend on his unconscious wife; but
before doing so, and before making any effort to restore Cecil from
her fainting fit, he deliberately picked her pocket of the two letters
which she had taken from the mantelpiece. Rapid as her movement had
been when she took possession of these two packets, the barrister's
piercing glances had discovered that they were addressed to himself.
"It's better that I should have them than any one else," he said, as he
transferred the letters to his own pocket.
He left Cecil in the care of the housemaid, and sent for a medical
man who had occasionally attended his wife. All that night he sat by
Cecil's bed-side, and through the greater part of the next day he still
kept his post. There was no journey to Devonshire; and Hector Gordon,
calling day by day in Brunswick Square, with a desperate defiance of
appearances, was apt to find a doctor's brougham standing at the door,
and for some time received an invariable answer from Pupkin--"Lady
Cecil O'Boyneville was still very ill."
It was a long wearisome illness; a low fever, with frequent delirium,
and a most terrible languor of mind and body. But slow and wearisome
as the malady was in its nature, Laurence O'Boyneville knew no such
thing as fatigue. He nursed his wife as tenderly as ever mother nursed
her fading child; snatching his broken sleep or his hasty meal how and
where he could, and carrying a bag full of briefs for the coming term
to the sick chamber, there to read and ponder in the dead of the night,
with ears always on the alert for the faintest variation in the low
breathing of the beloved sleeper, and with his watch open before him
to mark the hour when medicines were to be administered. The hired
nurse who performed the commoner duties of the sick chamber, snored
peacefully in Cecil's dressing-room during the dismal night-watch, and
was loud in her praises of the husband's devotion,--"which if there was
more like him, our dooties wouldn't be that wearin' as they are, and
there'd be less complaints of givin' way to stimilants; and gentlemen
which should be above blackenin' a pore woman's character would have no
call to throw their Sairy Gampses and Betsy Prigses in a lone female's
face," said this member of the Gamp species.