Rossmoyne Part 81

"So be it," she says gravely.

"You mean it?" says Ronayne, as yet afraid to believe in his happiness.

"Yes. But if ever you repent blame yourself."

"And if you repent?"

"I shall blame you too," she says, with a sudden return to her old archness.

"And you will refuse Rossmoyne?"

She laughs outright at this, and glances at him from under drooping lashes.

"I can't promise that," she says, with carefully simulated embarra.s.sment--"because----"

"What?" haughtily, moving away from her.

"I _did so yesterday_."

"Oh, darling, how cruelly I misjudged you! I thought--I feared----"

"Never mind all that. I know--I forgive you. I've a _lovely_ temper,"

says Olga, with self-gratulation.

"Why did you refuse him? Was it," hopefully, "because you didn't like him?"

"N--o. Not so much that--as----" again this shameless coquette hesitates, and turns her head uneasily from side to side, as though afraid to give utterance to the truth.

"What? Explain, Olga," says her lover, in a fresh agony.

"As that I----_loved you_!" returns she, with a heavenly smile.

His arms close round her, and at this moment she lets all her heart be seen by him. The mocking light dies out of her eyes, her face grows earnest. She lets her heart beat with happy unrestraint against his. The minutes fly, but time was never made to be counted by blissful lovers.

A gong sounding in the distance rouses them from their contented dreaming.

"I must go and tell Hermia," she says, starting to her feet: "that is the dressing-bell."

"You won't let her influence you against me?"

"n.o.body could do that." She moves away from him, and then runs back to him again and lays her arms round his neck.

"You are more to me now than Hermia and _the world_!" she says, softly.

Yet presently, when she finds herself in Hermia's calm presence, her courage somewhat fails her. It is not that she for a moment contemplates the idea of having to give up her lover, but she is afraid of her cousin's cold disparagement of both him and her.

"I have just promised to marry Ulic," she says, plunging without preface into her story, with a boldness born of nervous excitement.

"To _marry_ him! Why, I thought you looked upon him as a mere boy! Your 'baby,' you used to call him."

"Probably that is why I have accepted him. A baby should not be allowed to roam the world at large without some one to look after him."

"Do you love him, Olga?"

"Yes, I do," says Olga, defiantly. "You may scold me if you like, but a t.i.tle _isn't_ everything, and he is worth a dozen of that cold, stiff Rossmoyne."

"Well, dearest, as you have given him the best part of you,--your heart,--it is as well the rest should follow," says Mrs. Herrick, tenderly. "Yes, I think you will be very happy with him."

This speech is so strange, so unexpected, so exactly unlike anything she had made up her mind to receive, that for a moment Olga is stricken dumb. Then with a rush she comes back to glad life.

"'Do I wake? do I dream? are there visions about?'" she says. "Why, what sentiments from _you_! You have 'changed all that,' apparently."

"I have," says Hermia, very slowly, yet with a vivid blush. Something in her whole manner awakes suspicion of the truth in Olga's mind.

"Why," she says, "you don't mean to tell me that----Oh, no! it can't be true! and yet----I verily believe you have----_Is_ it so, Hermia?"

"It is," says Hermia, who has evidently, by help of some mental process of her own, understood all this amazing farrago of apparently meaningless words.

There is a new sweetness on Mrs. Herrick's lips. One of her rare smiles lights up all her calm, artistic face.

"After all your vaunted superiority!" says Olga, drawing a deep sigh.

"Oh, _dear_!" Then, with a wicked but merry imitation of Mrs. Herrick's own manner to her, she goes on!--

"You are throwing yourself away, dearest. The world will think nothing of you for the future; and you, so formed to shine, and dazzle, and----"

"_He_ will be a baronet at his father's death," says Mrs. Herrick, serenely, with a heavy emphasis on the first p.r.o.noun; and then suddenly, as though ashamed of this speech, she lets her mantle drop from her, and cries, with some tender pa.s.sion,----

"I don't care about that. Hear the truth from me. If he were as ugly and poor as Mary Browne's Peter, I should marry him all the same, just because I love him!"

"Oh, Hermia, I am so _glad_," says Olga. "After all what is there in the whole wide world so sweet as love? And as for Rossmoyne,--why, he couldn't make a tender speech to save his life as it should be made; whilst Ulic--_oh he's charming!_"

CHAPTER x.x.xI.

How Monica's heart fails her; and how at last Hope (whose name is Brian) comes back to her through the quivering moonlight.

And now night has fallen at last upon this long day. A gentle wind is shivering through the elms; a glorious moon has risen in all its beauty, and stands in "heaven's wide, pathless way," as though conscious of its grandeur, yet sad for the sorrows of the seething earth beneath. Now clear, now resplendent she shines, and now through a tremulous mist shows her pure face, and again for a s.p.a.ce is hidden,

"As if her head she bow'd Stooping through a fleecy cloud."

Miss Priscilla, with a sense of now-found dignity upon her, has gone early to bed. Miss Penelope has followed suit. Terence, in the privacy of his own room, is rubbing a dirty oily flannel on the bright barrels of his beloved gun, long since made over to him as a gift by Brian.

Kit is sitting on the wide, old-fashioned window-seat in Monica's room at her sister's feet, and with her thin little arms twined lovingly round her. She is sleepy enough, poor child, but cannot bear to desert Monica, who is strangely wakeful and rather silent and _distraite_. For ever since the morning when he had come to carry Miss Priscilla to Coole, Brian has been absent from her; not once has he come to her; and a sense of chill and fear, as strong as it is foolish, is overpowering her.

She rouses herself now with a little nervous quiver that seems to run through all her veins and lets her hand fall on Kit's drooping head.