Molly Bawn Part 66

"And still I am not 'appy?' How could I be when you did me out of that solitary dance you promised me? I really believed, when I asked you with such pathos in the early part of the evening to keep that one green spot in your memory for me, you would have done so."

"Did I forget you?" remorsefully. "Well, don't blame me. Mr. Lowry _would_ keep my card for me, and, as a natural consequence, it was lost. After that, how was it possible for me to keep to my engagements?"

"I think it was a delightful ball," Molly says, with perhaps a shade too much _empress.e.m.e.nt_. "I never in all my life enjoyed myself so well."

"Lucky you," says Cecil. "Had I been allowed I should perhaps have been happy too; but"--with a glance at Stafford, who is looking the very personification of languid indifference--"when people allow their tempers to get the better of them----" Here she pauses with an eloquent sigh.

"I hope you are not alluding to me," says Lowry, who is at her elbow, with a smile that awakes in Stafford a mild longing to strangle him.

"Oh, no!"--sweetly. "How could you think it? I am not ungrateful; and I know how carefully you tried to make my evening a pleasant one."

"If I succeeded it is more than I dare hope for," returns he, in a low tone, intended for her ears alone.

She smiles at him, and holds out her arm, that he may refasten the eighth b.u.t.ton of her glove that has mysteriously come undone. He rather lingers over the doing of it. He is, indeed, strangely awkward, and finds an unaccountable difficulty in inducing the refractory b.u.t.ton to go into its proper place.

"Shall we bivouac here for the remainder of the night, or seek our beds?" asks Sir Penthony, impatiently. "I honestly confess the charms of that eldest Miss Millbanks have completely used me up. Too much of a good thing is good for nothing; and she _is_ tall. Do none of the rest of you feel fatigue? I know women's pa.s.sion for conquest is not easily satiated,"--with a slight sneer--"but at five o'clock in the morning one might surely call a truce."

They agree with him, and separate, even the tardiest guest having disappeared by this time, with a last a.s.surance of how intensely they have enjoyed their evening; though when they reach their chambers a few of them give way to such despair and disappointment as rather gives the lie to their expressions of pleasure.

Poor Molly, in spite of her false gayety,--put on to mask the wounded pride, the new sensation of blankness that fills her with dismay,--flings herself upon her bed and cries away all the remaining hours that rest between her and her maid's morning visit.

"Alas! how easily things go wrong: A sigh too much or a kiss too long."

For how much less--for the mere suspicion of a kiss--have things gone wrong with her? How meagre is the harvest she has gathered in from all her antic.i.p.ated pleasure, how poor a fruition has been hers!

Now that she and her lover are irrevocably separated, she remembers, with many pangs of self-reproach, how tender and true and honest he has proved himself in all his dealings with her; and, though she cannot accuse herself of actual active disloyalty toward him, a hidden voice reminds her how lightly and with what persistent carelessness she accepted all his love, and how indifferently she made return.

With the desire to ease the heartache she is enduring, she tries--in vain--to encourage a wrathful feeling toward him, calling to mind how ready he was to believe her false, how easily he flung her off, for what, after all, was but a fancied offense. But the very agony of his face as he did so disarms her, recollecting as she does every change and all the pa.s.sionate disappointment of it.

Oh that she had repulsed Philip on the instant when first he took her hand, as it had been in her heart to do!--but for the misery he showed that for the moment softened her. Mercy on such occasions is only cruel kindness, so she now thinks,--and has been her own undoing. And besides, what is his misery to hers?

An intense bitterness, a positive hatred toward Shadwell, who has brought all this discord into her hitherto happy life, grows within her, filling her with a most unjust longing to see him as wretched as he has unwittingly made her; while yet she shrinks with ever-increasing reluctance from the thought that soon she must bring herself to look again upon his dark but handsome face.

Luttrell, too,--she must meet him; and, with such swollen eyes and pallid cheeks, the bare idea brings a little color into her white face.

As eight o'clock strikes, she rises languidly from her bed, dressed as she is, disrobing hurriedly, lest even her woman should guess how wakeful she had been, throws open her window, and lets the pure cold air beat upon her features.

But when Sarah comes she is not deceived. So distressed is she at her young mistress's appearance that she almost weeps aloud, and gives it as her opinion that b.a.l.l.s and all such nocturnal entertainments are the invention of the enemy.

CHAPTER XXV.

"Ah, starry hope, that didst arise But to be overcast!"

--Edgar A. Poe.

"The ring asunder broke."

--_German Song._

At breakfast Molly is very pale, and speaks little. She toys with her toast, but cannot eat. Being questioned, she confesses herself fatigued, not being accustomed to late hours.

She neither looks at Luttrell, nor does he seek to attract her attention in any way.

"A good long walk will refresh you more than anything," says Talbot Lowry, who has been spending the past few days at Herst. He addresses Molly, but his eyes seek Cecil's as he does so, in the fond hope that she will take his hint and come with him for a similar refresher to that he has prescribed for Molly.

Cecil's unfortunate encouragement of the night before--displayed more with a view to chagrining Sir Penthony than from a mere leaning toward coquetry--has fanned his pa.s.sion to a very dangerous height. He is consumed with a desire to speak, and madly flatters himself that there is undoubted hope for him.

To throw himself at Lady Stafford's feet, declare his love, and ask her to leave, for him, a husband who has never been more to her than an ordinary acquaintance, and to renounce a name that can have no charms for her, being devoid of tender recollections or sacred memories, seems to him, in his present over-strained condition, a very light thing indeed. In return, he argues feverishly, he can give her the entire devotion of a heart, and, what is perhaps a more practical offer, a larger income than she can now command.

Then, in the present day, what so easily, or quietly, or satisfactorily arranged, as a divorce in high life, leaving behind it neither spot nor scar, nor anything unpleasant in the way of social ostracism? And this might--nay, _should_--follow.

Like Molly, he has lain awake since early dawn arranging plans and rehearsing speeches; and now, after breakfast, as he walks beside the object of his adoration through the shrubberies and outer walks into the gardens beyond, carried away by the innate vanity of him, and his foolish self-esteem, and not dreaming of defeat, he decides that the time has come to give voice to his folly.

They are out of view of the windows, when he stops abruptly, and says rashly,--with a pale face, it is true, but a certain amount of composure that bespeaks confidence,--"Cecil, I can keep silence no longer. Let me speak to you, and tell you all that is in my heart."

"He has fallen in love with Molly," thinks Cecil, wondering vaguely at the manner of his address, he having never attempted to call her by her Christian name before.

"You are in love?" she says, kindly, but rather uncertainly, not being able at the moment to call to mind any tender glances of his cast at Molly or any suspicious situations that might confirm her in her fancy.

"Need you ask?" says Lowry, taking her hand, feeling still further emboldened by the gentleness with which she has received his first advance. "Have not all these months--nay, this year past--taught you so much?"

"'This year past?'" Cecil repeats, honestly at sea, and too much surprised by the heat of his manner to grasp at once the real meaning of his words. Though I think a second later a faint inkling of it comes to her, because she releases her hand quickly from his clasp, and her voice takes a sharper tone. "I do not understand you," she says, "Take care you understand--yourself."

But the warning comes too late. Lowry, bent on his own destruction, goes on vehemently:

"I do--too well. Have I not had time to learn it?" he says, pa.s.sionately. "Have I not spent every day, every hour, in thoughts of you? Have I not lived in antic.i.p.ation of our meeting? While you, Cecil, surely you, too, were glad when we were together. The best year I have ever known has been this last, in which I have grown to love you."

"Pray cease," says Cecil, hurriedly, stepping back and raising her hand imperiously. "What can you mean? You must be out of your senses to speak to me like this."

Although angry, she is calm, and, indeed, scarcely cares to give way to indignation before Lowry, whom she has always looked upon with great kindness and rather in the light of a boy. She is a little sorry for him, too, that he should have chosen to make a fool of himself with her, who, she cannot help feeling, is his best friend. For to all the moodiness and oddity of his nature she has been singularly lenient, bearing with him when others would have lost all patience. And this is her reward. For a full minute Lowry seems confounded. Then, "I must indeed be bereft of reason," he says, in a low, intense voice, "if I am to believe that you can receive like this the a.s.surance of my love. It cannot be altogether such a matter of wonder--my infatuation for you--as you would have me think, considering how you"--in a rather choked tone--"led me on."

"'Led you on'! My dear Mr. Lowry, how can you talk so foolishly? I certainly thought I knew you very well, and"--docketing off each item on her fingers--"I let you run my messages now and then; and I danced with you; and you sent me the loveliest flowers in London or out of it; and you were extremely kind to me on all occasions; but then so many other men were kind also, that really beyond the flowers,"--going back to her second finger,--"(which were incomparably finer than those I ever received from any one else), I don't see that you were more to me than the others."

"Will you not listen to me? Will you not even let me plead my cause?"

"Certainly not, considering what a cause it is. You must be mad."

"You are cold as ice," says he, losing his head. "No other woman but yourself would consent to live as you do. A wife, and yet no wife!"

"Mr. Lowry," says Lady Stafford, with much dignity but perfect temper, "you forget yourself. I must really beg you not to discuss my private affairs. The life I lead might not suit you or any single one of your acquaintance, but it suits me, and that is everything. You say I am 'cold,' and you are right: I am. I fancied (wrongly) my acknowledged coldness would have prevented such a scene as I have been forced to listen to, by you, to-day. You are the first who has ever dared to insult me. You are, indeed, the first man who has ever been at my feet, metaphorically speaking or otherwise; and I sincerely trust," says Lady Stafford, with profound earnestness, "you may be the last, for anything more unpleasant I never experienced."

"Have you no pity for me?" cries he, pa.s.sionately. "Why need you scorn my love? Every word you utter tears my heart, and you,--you care no more than if I were a dog! Have you no feeling? Do you never wish to be as other women are, beloved and loving, instead of being as now----"

"Again, sir, I must ask you to allow my private life to _be_ private," says Cecil, still with admirable temper, although her color has faded a good deal, and the fingers of one hand have closed convulsively upon a fold of her dress. "I may, perhaps, pity you, but I can feel nothing but contempt for the love you offer, that would lower the thing it loves!"