Mildred Arkell Volume Iii Part 22

Georgina sat at a table apart, reading a new book, or appearing to read it. Was she covertly watching that sofa at a distance? It was so different, this sitting still, from her usual restless habits of flitting everywhere. Suddenly she closed her book, and went up to them.

"I have come to call you to account, Fred," she began, speaking in her most familiar manner, but in a low tone. "Don't you see whose heart you are breaking?"

He had been sitting with his head slightly bent, as he spoke in a whisper to his beautiful companion. Her eyes were cast down, her fingers unconsciously pulled apart the petals of some geranium she held; her whole att.i.tude bespoke a not unwilling listener. Georgina's salutation surprised both, for they had not seen her approach. They looked up.

"What do you say?" cried St. John. "Breaking somebody's heart? Whose?

Yours?"

She laughed in derision, flirting some of the scent out of a golden phial she had taken up. "Sarah, _you_ should have more consideration,"

she continued. "It is all very well when Lady Anne's not present, but when she _is_--There! you need not go into a flaming fever and fling your angry eyes upon me. Look at Sarah's face, Mr. St. John."

Mr. St. John walked away, as though he had not heard. Sarah caught hold of her cousin.

"There is a limit to endurance, Georgina. If you pursue this style of conversation to me--learnt, as I have repeatedly told you, from the housemaids, unless it is inherent," she added, in deep scorn--"I shall make an appeal to the dean."

"Make it," said Georgina, laughing. "It was too bad of you, Sarah, with his future wife present. She'll go to bed and dream of jealousy."

Quitting her cousin, she went straight up to Henry Arkell. "Why do you mope like this?" she cried.

"Mope!" he repeated.

He had been at another table leaning his head upon his hand. It was aching much: and he told her so.

"Oh, Harry, I am sorry; I forgot your fall. Will you sing a song?"

"I don't think I can to-night."

"But papa has been talking to the judges about it. I heard him say your singing was worth listening to. I suppose he had been telling them all about you, and the whole romance, you know, of Mrs. Peter Arkell's marriage, for one of them--it was the old one--said he used to be intimate with her father, Colonel Cheveley. Here comes the dean! that's to ask you to sing."

He sat down at once, and sang a song of the day. Then he went on to one that I dare say you all know and like--"Shall I, wasting in despair." At its conclusion one of the judges--it was the old one, as Georgina irreverently called him--came to him at the piano, and asked if he could sing Luther's Hymn.

A few chords by way of prelude, lasting some few minutes, probably played to form a break between the worldly song and the sacred one--for if anyone was ever endowed with an innate sense of what was due to sacred things, it was Henry Arkell--and then the grand old hymn, in all its beautiful simplicity, burst upon their ears. Never had it been done greater justice to than it was by that solitary college boy. The room was hushed to stillness; the walls echoed with the sweet sounds; the solemn words thrilled on the listeners' hearts, and the singer's whole soul seemed to go up with them. Oh, how strange it was, that the judge should have called for that particular, sacred song!

The echoes of it died away in the deepest stillness. It was broken by Henry himself; he closed the piano, as if nothing else must be allowed to come after that; and the tacit mandate was accepted, and n.o.body thought of inquiring how he came to a.s.sume the liberty in the dean's house.

Gradually the room resumed its humming and its self-absorption, and Georgina Beauclerc, under cover of it, went up to him.

"How could you make the excuse that your head was aching? None, with any sort of sickness upon them, could sing as you have just done."

"Not even with heart sickness," he answered.

"Now you are going to be absurd again! What do you mean?"

"To-night has taught me a great deal, Georgina. If I have been foolish enough--fond enough, I might say--to waver in my doubts before, that's over for ever."

"So much the better; you will be cured now."

She had spoken only lightly, not meaning to be unkind or unfeeling; but she saw what she had done, by his quivering lip. Leaning across him as he stood, under cover of showing him something on the table, she spoke in a deep, earnest tone.

"Henry, you know it could never be. Better that you should see the truth now, than go on in this dream of folly. Stay away for a short while if you will, and overget it; and then we will be fast friends as before."

"And this is to be the final ending?"

She stole a glance round at him, his voice had so strange a sound in it.

Every trace of colour had faded from his face.

"Yes; it is the only possible ending. If you get on well and become somebody grand, you and I can be as brother and sister in after life."

She moved away as she spoke. It may be that she saw further trifling would not do. But even in the last sentence, thoughtlessly though she had spoken it, there was an implied consciousness of the wide difference in their social standing, all too prominent to that sensitive ear.

A minute afterwards St. John looked round for him, and could not see him.

"Where's Henry Arkell?" he asked of Georgina.

She looked round also.

"He is gone, I suppose," she answered. "He was in one of his stupid moods to-night."

"That's something new for him. Stupid?"

"I used the word in a wide sense. Crazy would have been better."

"What do you mean, Georgina?"

"He is a little crazy at times--to me. There! that's all I am going to tell you: you are not my father confessor."

"True," he said; "but I think I understand without confession. Take care, Georgina."

"Take care of what?"

"Of--I may as well say it--of exciting hopes that are most unlikely to be realized. Better play a true part than a false one."

She laughed a little saucy laugh.

"Don't you think I might turn the tables and warn you of that? What false hopes are you exciting, Mr. St. John?"

"None," he answered. "It is not in my nature to be false, even in sport."

Her laugh changed to one of derision; and Mr. St. John, disliking the sound, disliking the words, turned from her, and joined the dean, who was then deep in a discussion with one of the judges.

CHAPTER IX.

THE SHADOW OF DEATH.

The days went on; and the dull, heavy pain in the head, complained of by Henry Arkell, increased in intensity. At first his absence from his desk at school, his vacant place at college, excited comment, but in time, as the newness of it wore off, it grew to be no longer noticed. It is so with all things. On the afternoon of the fall, the family surgeon was called in to him: he saw no cause for apprehension, he said; the head only required rest. It might have been better, perhaps, had the head (including the body and brain) been able to take the recommended rest; but it could not. On the Monday morning came the excitement of the medal affair, as related to him by Mr. St. John, and also by many of the school; in the evening there occurred the excitement of that business of the register; the interview with the Prattletons, and subsequently with Mr. Fauntleroy. On the next day he had to appear as a witness; and then came the deanery dinner in the evening and Georgina Beauclerc. All sources of great and unwonted excitement, had he been in his usual state of health: what it was to him now, never could be ascertained.