HOUR after hour Loyd knelt beside the bed where Florence lay, motionless
and unconscious. Her aunt and sister glided noiselessly about, passed in
and out of the room, rarely speaking, and then but in a whisper. At last
a servant whispered in Loyd’s ear a message. He started and said, “Yes,
let him wait;” and then, in a moment after, added, “No, say no. I’ll not
want the boat--the luggage may be taken back to my room.”
It was a few minutes after this that Emily came behind him, and, bending
down so as to speak in his ear, said, “How I thank you, my dear brother,
for this! I know the price of your devotion--none of us will ever forget
it.”
He made no answer, but pressed the cold damp hand he held to his lips.
“Does he know that it is nigh seven o’clock, Milly, and that he must
be at Como a quarter before eight, or he’ll lose the train?” said Miss
Grainger to her niece.
“He knows it all, aunt; he has sent away the boat; he will not desert
us.”
“Remember, child, what it is he is sacrificing. It may chance to be his
whole future fortune.”
“He’ll stay, let it cost what it may,” said Emily.
“I declare I think I will speak to him. It is my duty to speak to him,”
said the old lady, in her own fussy, officious tone. “I will not expose
myself to the reproaches of his family--very just reproaches, too, if
they imagined we had detained him. He will lose, not only his passage
out to India, but, not impossibly, his appointment too.
“Joseph, Joseph, I have a word to say to you.”
“Dearest aunt, I implore you not to say it,” cried Emily.
“Nonsense, child. Is it for a mere tiff and a fit of hysterics a man
is to lose his livelihood? Joseph Loyd, come into the next room for a
moment.”
“I cannot leave this,” said he, in a low, faint voice: “say what you
have to say to me here.”
“It is on the stroke of seven.”
He nodded.
“The train leaves a quarter before eight, and if you don’t start by this
one you can’t reach Leghorn by Tuesday.”
“I know it; I’m not going.”
“Do you mean to give up your appointment?” asked she, in a voice of
almost scornful reproach.
“I mean, that I’ll not go.”
“What will your friends say to this?” said she, angrily.
“I have not thought, nor can I think, of that now: my place is here.”
“Then I must protest; and I beg you to remember that I have protested
against this resolve on your part. Your family are not to say,
hereafter, that it was through any interference or influence of ours
that you took this unhappy determination. I’ll write, this very day, to
your father and say so. There, it is striking seven now!”
He made no reply; indeed, it seemed as if he had not heard her.
“You might still be in time, if you were to exert yourself.” whispered
she, with more earnestness.
“I tell you again,” said he, raising his voice to a louder pitch, “that
my place is here, and I will not leave her.”
A low, faint sigh was breathed by the sick girl, and gently moving her
hand, she laid it on his head.
“You know me then, dearest?” whispered he. “You know who it is kneels
beside you?”
She made no answer, but her feeble fingers tried to play with his hair,
and strayed, unguided, over his head.
What shape of reproach, remonstrance, or protest, Miss Grainger’s
mutterings took, is not recorded; but she bustled out of the room,
evidently displeased with all in it.
“She knows you, Joseph. She is trying to thank you,” said Emily.
“Her lips are moving: can you hear what she says, Milly?”
The girl bent over the bed, till her ear almost touched her sister’s
mouth. “Yes, darling, from his heart he does. He never loved you with
such devotion as now. She asks if you can forgive her, Joseph. She
remembers everything.”
“And not leave me,” sighed Florence, in a voice barely audible.
“No, my own dearest, I will not leave you,” was all that he could utter
in the conflict of joy and sorrow he felt A weak attempt to thank him
she made by an effort to press his hand, but it sent a thrill of delight
through his heart, more than a recompense for all he had suffered.
If Emily, with a generous delicacy, retired towards the window and took
up her work, not very profitably perhaps, seeing how little light came
through the nearly closed shutters, let us not show ourselves less
discreet, and leave the lovers to themselves. Be assured, dear reader,
that in our reserve on this point we are not less mindful of your
benefit than of theirs. The charming things, so delightful to say and so
ecstatic to hear, are wonderfully tame to tell. Perhaps their very charm
is in the fact, that their spell was only powerful to those who uttered
them. At all events, we are determined on discretion, and shall only own
that, though Aunt Grainger made periodical visits to the sick-room,
with frequent references to the hour of the day, and the departures and
arrival of various rail trains, they never heard her, or, indeed, knew
that she was present.
And though she was mistress of those “asides” and that grand innuendo
style which is so deadly round a corner, they never paid the slightest
heed to her fire. All the adroit references to the weather, and the
“glorious day for travelling,” went for naught As well as the more
subtle compliments she made Florence on the appetite she displayed for
her chocolate, and which were intended to convey that a young lady who
enjoyed her breakfast so heartily need never have lost a man a passage
to Calcutta for the pleasure of seeing her eat it. Truth was, Aunt
Grainger was not in love, and consequently, no more fit to legislate for
those who were than a peasant in rude health is to sympathise with the
nervous irritability of a fine lady! Neither was Milly in love, you will
perhaps say, and _she_ felt for them. True, but Milly might be--Milly
was constitutionally exposed to the malady, and the very vicinity of the
disease was what the faculty call a predisposing cause. It made her very
happy to see Joseph so fond, and Florence so contented.
Far too happy to think of the price he paid for his happiness, Loyd
passed the day beside her. Never before was he so much in love! Indeed,
it was not till the thought of losing her for ever presented itself,
that he knew or felt what a blank life would hereafter become to him.
Some quaint German writer has it that these little quarrels which
lovers occasionally get up as a sort of trial of their own powers of
independence, are like the attempt people make to remain a long time
under-water, and which only end in a profound conviction that their
organisation was unequal to the test But there is another form these
passing differences occasionally take. Each of the erring parties is
sure to nourish in his or her heart the feeling of being most intensely
beloved by the other! It is a strange form for selfishness to take, but
selfishness is the most Protaean of all failings, and there never was
seen the mask it could not fit to its face.
“And so you imagined you could cast me off, Florence!” “And you, Master
Joseph, had the presumption to think you could leave me,” formed the sum
and substance of that long day’s whispering. My dear, kind reader, do
not despise the sermon from the seeming simplicity of the text There is
a deal to be said on it, and very pleasantly said, too. It is, besides,
a sort of litigation in which charge and cross charge recur incessantly,
and, as in all amicable suits, each party pays his own costs.
It was fortunate, most fortunate, that their reconciliation took this
form. It enabled each to do that which was most imminent to be done--to
ignore Calvert altogether, and never recur to any mention of his name.
Loyd saw that the turquoise ring was no longer worn by her, and she,
with a woman’s quickness, noted his observation of the fact I am not
sure that in her eyes a recognition of his joy did not glisten, but she
certainly never uttered a word that could bring up his name.
“So I am your guest, Madam, for ten days more!” said Loyd to Miss
Grainger, as they sat at tea that night.
“Oh, we are only too happy. It is a very great pleasure to us, if--if we
could feel that your delay may not prove injurious to you.”
“It will be very enjoyable, at all events,” said he, with an easy smile,
and as though to evade the discussion of the other “count”.
“I was thinking of what your friends would say about it.”
“It is a very limited public, I assure you,” said he, laughing, “and one
which so implicitly trusts me, that I have only to say I have done what
I believed to be right to be confirmed in their good esteem.”
The old lady was not to be put off by generalities, and she questioned
him closely as to whether an overland passage did not cost a hundred
pounds and upwards, and all but asked whether it was quite convenient
to him to disburse that amount She hinted something about an adage of
people who “paid for their whistle,” but suggested some grave doubts if
they ever felt themselves recompensed in after time by recollecting the
music that had cost so dearly; in a word, she made herself supremely
disagreeable while he drank his tea, and only too glad to make his
escape to go and sit beside Florry, and talk over again all they had
said in the morning.
“Only think, Milly,” said she, poutingly, as her sister entered, “how
Aunt Grainger is worrying poor Joseph, and won’t let him enjoy in peace
the few days we are to have together.”
But he did enjoy them, and to the utmost Florence very soon threw off
all trace of her late indisposition, and sought, in many ways, to make
her lover forget all the pain she had cost him. The first week was one
of almost unalloyed happiness; the second opened with the thought that
the days were numbered. After Monday came Tuesday, then Wednesday, which
preceded Thursday, when he was to leave.
How was it, they asked themselves, that a whole week had gone over? It
was surely impossible! Impossible it must be, for now they remembered
the mass of things they had to talk over together, not one of which had
been touched on.
“Why, Joseph dearest, you have told me nothing about yourself. Whether
you are to be in Calcutta, or up the country? Where, and how I am to
write? When I am to hear from you? What of papa--I was going to say,
our papa--would he like to hear from me, and may I write to him? Dare I
speak to him as a daughter? Will he think me forward or indelicate for
it? May I tell him of all our plans? Surely you ought to have told me
some of these things! What could we have been saying to each other all
this while?”
Joseph looked at her, and she turned away her head pettishly, and
murmured something about his being too absurd. Perhaps he was; I
certainly hold no brief to defend him in the case: convict or acquit
him, dear reader, as you please.
And yet, notwithstanding this appeal, the next three days passed
over just as forgetfully as their predecessors, and then came the sad
Wednesday evening, and the sadder Thursday morning, when, wearied out
and exhausted, for they had sat up all night--his last night--to say
good-bye.
“I declare he will be late again; this is the third time he has come
back from the boat,” exclaimed Miss Grainger, as Florence sank, half
fainting, into Emily’s arms.
“Yes, yes, dear Joseph,” muttered Emily, “go now, go at once, before she
recovers again.”
“If I do not, I never can,” cried he, as the tears coursed down his
face, while he hurried away.
The monotonous beat of the oars suddenly startled the half-conscious
girl; she looked up, and lifted her hand to wave an adieu, and then sank
back into her sister’s arms, and fainted.
Three days after, a few hurried lines from Loyd told Florence that he
had sailed for Malta--this time irrevocably off. They were as sad lines
to read as to have written. He had begun by an attempt at jocularity; a
sketch of his fellow-travellers coming on board; their national traits,
and the strange babble of tongues about them; but, as the bell rang, he
dropped this, and scrawled out, as best he could, his last and blotted
good-byes. They were shaky, ill-written words, and might, who knows,
have been blurred with a tear or two. One thing is certain, she who
read, shed many over them, and kissed them, with her last waking breath,
as she fell asleep.
About the same day that this letter reached Florence, came another,
and very different epistle, to the hands of Algernon Drayton, from
his friend Calvert It was not above a dozen lines, and dated from
Alexandria:
“The Leander has just steamed in, crowded with snobs, civil
and military, but no Loyd. The fellow must have given up his
appointment or gone ‘long sea.’ In any case, he has escaped
me. I am frantic. A whole month’s plottings of vengeance
scattered to the winds and lost! I’d return to England,
if I were only certain to meet with him: but a Faquir, whom
I have just consulted, says, ‘Go east, and the worst will
come of it!’ and so I start in two hours for Suez. There
are two here who know me, but I mean to caution them how
they show it; they are old enough to take a hint.
“Yours, H. C.
“I hear my old regiment has mutinied, and sabred eight of
the officers. I wish they’d have waited a little longer, and
neither S. nor W. would have got off so easily. From all I
can learn, and from the infernal fright the fellows who are
going back exhibit, I suspect that the work goes bravely
on.”