Rossmoyne Part 54

"But I say you must," says Desmond, taking a very superior tone. "It is yours, not mine. I have nothing to do with it. It was never meant for me. See," taking up her hand and slipping the ring on her engaged finger, "how pretty your little white hand makes it look!"

It is always a difficult thing to a woman to bring herself to refuse diamonds, but doubly difficult once she has seen them positively adorning her own person.

Monica looks at the ring, then sighs, then turns it round and round mechanically, and finally glances at Desmond. He returns the glance by pa.s.sing his arm round her shoulders, after which there is never another word said about the ownership of the ring.

"But it will put my poor little pigs in the shade, won't it?" says Monica, looking at her other hand, and then at him archly. "Oh! it is lovely--_lovely_!"

"I think I might have chosen you a prettier one, had I run up to Dublin and gone to Waterhouse myself," says Desmond; "but I knew if I went I could not possibly get back until to-morrow evening, and that would mean losing two whole days of our precious seven."

This speech pleases Monica, I think, even more than the ring.

"I am glad you did not go," she says, softly.

"So am I--especially as----" Here he pauses, and then goes on again hurriedly. "If I had gone, Monica, you would not have forgotten me?"

"How could I forget you in two little days?"

"They would have been two very big days to me. But tell me, if I were to go away from you for a far longer time--say for a whole month--would you still be faithful? Should I find you as I left you,--indifferent to others at least, if not wholly mine?"

"Why should I change?"

"Darling, there are so many reasons." He draws his breath quickly, impatiently. "Some day, you may meet some one else--more suited to you, perhaps, and----"

"I shall never do that." She interrupts him slowly, but decidedly.

"You are sure?"

"Yes."

The answer in words perhaps is meagre; but he, looking into the depths of her soft eyes, sees a surer answer there, and is satisfied.

The shadows are growing longer and slower. They do not dance and quiver now in mad glee, as they did an hour agone.

"I think we must go back," says Monica, with unconcealed regret.

"What! you will throw me again into temptation? into the very arms of the fair Bella?" says Desmond, laughing.

"Reflect, I beg of you, before it is too late."

"After all," says Monica, "I don't think I have behaved very nicely about her. I don't think now it would be a--a pretty thing to make you give me the roses before her. No, you must not do that; and you must not manage to forget them, either. You shall bring the handsomest you can find and give them to her,--but _publicly_ Brian, just as if there was nothing in it, you know."

"There is nothing like adhering to the strict truth," says Brian. "There shall be nothing in my roses, I promise you,--except perfume."

CHAPTER XX.

How gossip grows rife at Aghyohillbeg--How Hermia parries the question, and how Olga proves unkind.

"She's _disgracefully_ ugly!--I saw her quite close," says Mr. Kelly, in an injured tone. "I wonder what on earth Madam O'Connor means by asking her here, where she can be nothing but a blot upon a perfect landscape; all the rest of us are so lovely."

It is four o'clock, and hopelessly wet. The soft rain patters on the leaves outside, the gra.s.s and all the gardens are drowned in Nature's tears. There can be no lounging on sunny terraces, no delicious dreaming under shady beech-trees, this lost afternoon.

Giving in to the inevitable with a cheerful resignation worthy of record, they have all congregated in the grand old hall, one of the chief glories of Aghyohillbeg.

Through a vague but mistaken notion that it will add to their comfort and make them cosier and more forgetful of--or at least more indifferent to--the sunshine of yesterday, they have had an enormous fire of pine logs kindled upon the hearth. When too late, they discover it to be a discomfort; but, with a stoicism worthy a better cause, they decline to acknowledge their error, and stand in groups round the aggressive logs, pretending to enjoy them, but in reality dying of heat.

Meanwhile, the fragrant pieces of pine roar and crackle merrily, throwing shadows up the huge chimney, and casting bright gleams of light upon the exquisite oaken carving of the ancient chimney-piece that reaches almost to the lofty ceiling and is now blackened by age and beautiful beyond description.

Olga, in a sage-green gown, is lying back listlessly in a deep arm-chair; she has placed an elbow on either arm of it, and has brought her fingers so far towards each other that their tips touch. Hermia Herrick, in a gown of copper-red, is knitting languidly a little silk sock for the child nestling silently at her knee.

Monica, in plain white India muslin, is doing nothing, unless smiling now and then at Brian Desmond be anything, who is lying on a bear-skin rug, looking supremely happy and full of life and spirits. He has come over from Coole very early, being generously urged so to do by Madam O'Connor when parting with him last night. Ryde is not on the field, so the day is his own.

Miss Fitzgerald is looking rather handsome, in a dress of the very tiniest check, that is meant for a small woman only, or a child, and so makes her appear several sizes larger than she really is. Ulic Ronayne, standing leaning against the chimney-piece as close to Olga as circ.u.mstances will permit, is silent to a fault; and, indeed, every one but Mr. Kelly has succ.u.mbed to the damp depression of the air.

They have had only one distraction all day,--the arrival of another guest, a distant cousin of their hostess, who has been lauding her for a week or so. On inspection she proves to be a girl of nineteen, decidedly unprepossessing in appearance,--in fact, as Mr. Murphy, the butler, says to Mrs. Collins, the housekeeper, "as ugly as if she was bespoke."

A tall girl oppressed by freckles and with hair of a deep--well, let us emulate our polite French neighbors and call it _blond ardent_.

"Who is she?" asks Lord Rossmoyne, who arrived about an hour ago, to Ulic Ronayne's discomfiture.

"She's a fraud!" says Mr. Kelly, indignantly,--"a swindle! Madam a.s.sured us, last night, a charming girl was coming, to turn all heads and storm all hearts; and to-day, when we rushed in a body to the window and flattened our noses against the panes to see her, lo! a creature with red hair and pimples----"

"No, no; freckled, my dear Owen," interrupts Olga, indolently.

"It is all the same at a distance! general effect fatal in both cases,"

says Mr. Kelly, airily. "It makes one positively uncomfortable to look at her. I consider her being thrust upon us like this a deliberate insult. I think if she continues I shall leave."

"Oh, _don't_," says Desmond, in a tone of agonized entreaty. "How _should_ we manage to get on without you?"

"Badly, badly, I know that," regretfully. "But it is a question of breaking either your hearts or mine. Some of us must go to the wall; it would be unfair to the world to make it me."

"I don't believe you will go far," says Mrs. Herrick, slowly. Kelly glances at her quickly, but she does not lift her eyes from the little sock, and her fingers move rapidly, easily as ever.

"London or Paris," he says,--"the city of fogs or the city of frogs. I don't know which I prefer."

"Better stay where you are," says Brian.

"Well, I really didn't think her so very plain," says Bella Fitzgerald, who thinks it pretty to say the kind thing always. "A large mouth _is_ an affliction, certainly; and as for her complexion--but really, after all, it is better to see it as it is than painted and powdered, as one sees other people."

This is a faint cut at Olga, who is fond of powder, and who has not scrupled to add to her charms by a little touch of rouge now and then when she felt pallor demanded it.

"I think a little artificial aid might improve poor Miss Browne," says Hermia Herrick. Miss Browne is the new arrival.

"I don't. I think it is an abominable thing to cheat the public like that," says Miss Fitzgerald, doggedly: "n.o.body respectable would do it.

The _demi-monde_ paint and powder."