Vera Nevill Part 57

And then Denis Wilde took his place by her side.

If Mrs. Kynaston surpa.s.sed herself in looks and animation that day, Vera, on the contrary, had never looked less well.

Her eyes were heavy with sleepless nights and many tears; her movements were slower and more languid than of wont, and her face was pale and thin.

Meadowshire generally, that had ceased to trouble itself much about her when she had thrown over the richest baronet in the county, considered itself, nevertheless, to be somewhat aggrieved by the falling off in her appearance, and pa.s.sed its appropriate and ill-natured comments upon the fact.

"How ill she looks," said one woman to another.

"Positively old. I suppose she thought she could whistle poor Sir John back again whenever she chose; now he is out of the country she would give her eyes for him!"

"I daresay; and looks as if she had cried them out; but he must be glad to have escaped her! Well, it serves her right for behaving so badly. I'm sure I don't pity her."

"Nor I, indeed."

And the two amiable women pa.s.sed onwards to discuss some other ill-fated victim.

But to the two men who loved her Vera that day was as beautiful as ever; for love sees no flaw in the face that reigns supreme in the soul. And Vera sat still in her corner of the tent where she had taken refuge, and leant her tired, aching head against a gaudy pink-and-white striped pillar. It was the tent where the flower-show was going on. From her sheltered nook there was not much that was lovely to be seen, not a vestige of a rose or a carnation to refresh her tired eyes, only a counter covered with samples of potatoes and monster cauliflowers; and there was a slab of white wood with pats of yellow b.u.t.ter, done up in moss and ferns, which had been sent from the princ.i.p.al dairy-farms of the county, and before which there was a constant succession of elderly and interested housewives tasting and comparing notes. There seemed some difficulty in deciding to whom the b.u.t.ter prize was to be awarded, and at last a committee of ladies was formed; they all tasted, solemnly, of each sample all round, and then they each gave their verdict differently, so that it had all to be done over again amidst a good deal of laughter and merriment.

Vera was vaguely amused by this scene that went on just in front of her.

When the knotty point was settled, the committee moved on to decide upon something else, and she was left again to the uninterrupted contemplation of the Flukes and the York Regents.

Denis Wilde had sat by her for some time, but at last she had begged him to leave her. Her head ached, she said; if he would not mind going, and he went.

Presently, Beatrice, beaming with happiness, found her out in her corner.

"Oh, Vera!" she said, coming up to her, all radiant with smiles, "you are the only one of my friends who has not yet wished me joy."

"That is not because I have not thought of you, Beatrice, dear," she answered, heartily grasping her friend's outstretched hands. "I was so very glad to hear that everything has come right for you at last. How did it all happen?"

"I will come over to the vicarage to-morrow, and tell you the whole story. Oh! do you remember meeting Herbert and me, that foggy morning, outside Tripton station?"

Would Vera ever forget it?

"I little thought then how happily everything was to end for us. I used to think we should have to elope! Poor Herbert, he was always frightened out of his life when I said that. But we have had a very narrow escape of being blighted beings to the end of our lives. If it hadn't been for uncle Tom and that dear darling mare, Clochette, whom I should like to keep in a gold and jewelled stall to the end of her ever-blessed days!----Ah, well! I've no time to tell you now--I will come over to Sutton to-morrow, and I may bring him, may I not?"

"Him," of course, meaning Mr. Herbert Pryme. Vera requested that he might be brought by all means.

"Well, I must run away now--there are at least a hundred of these stupid people to whom I must go and make myself agreeable. By the way, Vera, how dull you look, up in this corner by yourself. Why do you sit here all alone?"

"My head aches; I am glad to be quiet."

"But you mean to dance by-and-by, I hope?"

"Oh, yes, I daresay. Go back to your guests, Beatrice; I am getting on very well."

Beatrice went off smiling and waving her hand. Vera could watch her outside in the sunshine, moving about from group to group, shaking hands with first one and then another, laughing at some playful sally, or smiling demurely over some graver words of kindness. She was always popular, was Beatrice, with her bright talk and her plain clever face, and there was not a man or woman in all that crowd who did not wish her happiness.

And so the day wore away, and the polo match--very badly played--was over, and the votaries of lawn-tennis were worn out with running up and down, and the flowers and the fruits in the show-tent began to look limp and dusty. The farmers and those people of small importance who had only been invited "from two to five," began now to take their departure, and their carriage wheels were to be heard driving away in rapid succession from the front door. Then the hundred or so of the "best county people," who were remaining later for the dancing, began to think of leaving the lawns before the dew fell. There was a general move towards the house, and even the band "limbered up," and began to transfer itself from the garden into the hall, where its labours were to begin afresh.

Then it was that Vera crept forth out of her sheltered corner, and, unseen and unnoticed save by one watchful pair of eyes, wended her way through the shrubbery walks in the direction of the Bath.

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

SHADONAKE BATH.

A jolly place--in times of old, But something ails it now: The spot is cursed!

Wordsworth.

Calm and still, like the magic mirror of the legend, Shadonake Bath lay amongst its everlasting shadows.

The great belt of fir-trees beyond it, the sheltering evergreens on the nearer side, the tiers of grey, moss-grown steps that encompa.s.sed it about, all found their image again upon its smooth and untroubled surface. There was a golden light from the setting sun to the west, and the pale mist of a shadowy crescent moon had risen in the east.

It was all quiet here--faint echoes of distant voices and far-away laughter came up in little gusts from the house; but there was no trace of the festivities down by the desolate water, nothing but the dark fir-trees above it, and the great white heads of the water-lilies that lay like jewels upon its silent bosom.

Vera sat down upon the steps, and rested her chin in her hands, and waited. The house and the gardens behind her were shut out by the thick screen of laurels and rhododendrons. Before her, on the other side, were the fir-trees, with their red, bronzed trunks, and the soft, dark brown carpet that lay at their feet; there was not even a squirrel stirring among their branches, nor a bird that fluttered beneath their shadows.

Vera waited. She was not impatient nor anxious. She had nothing to say to Maurice when he came--she did not mean to keep him, not even for five minutes, by her side; she did not want to run any further risks with him--it was better not--better that she should never again be alone with him. She only meant just to give him that wretched little brown paper parcel that weighed upon her conscience with the sense of an unfulfilled vow, and then to go back with him to the house at once. They could have nothing more to say to each other.

Strangely enough, as she sat there musing all her life came back in review before her. The old days at Rome, with the favourite sister who was dead and gone; her own gay, careless life, with its worldly aims and desires; her first arrival at Sutton, her determination to make herself Sir John Kynaston's wife, and then her fatal love for his brother; it all came back to her again. All kinds of little details that she had long forgotten came flooding in upon her memory. She remembered how she had first seen Maurice standing at the foot of the staircase, with the light of the lamp upon his handsome head; and then, again, how one morning she and he had stood together in this very place by the Bath, and how she had told him, shuddering, that it would be dreadful to be drowned there, and she had cried out in a nameless terror that she wished she had not seen it for the first time with him by her side; and then Helen had come down from the house and joined them, and they had all three gone away together. She smiled a little to herself over that foolish, reasonless terror. The quiet pool of water did not look dreadful to her now--only cool, and still, and infinitely restful.

By-and-by other thoughts came into her mind. She recalled her interview with old Lady Kynaston at Walpole Lodge, when she had so nearly promised her to give back her hand to her eldest son, when she would have done so had it not been for that sight of Maurice's face in the adjoining room.

She wondered what Lady Kynaston had thought of her sudden change of mind; what she had been able to make of it; whether she had ever guessed at what had been the truth. It seemed only yesterday that the old lady had told her to be wise and brave, and to begin her life over again, and to make the best of the good things of this world that were still left to her.

"There is a pain that goes right through the heart," Maurice's mother had said to her; "I who speak to you have felt it. I thought I should die of it, but you see I did not."

Alas! did not Vera know that pain all too well; that heartache that banishes peace by day and sleep by night, and that will not wear itself out?

And yet other women had borne it, and had lived and been even happy in other ways; but she could not be happy. Was it because her heart was deeper, or because her sense of pain was greater than that of others?

Vera could not tell. She only wished, and longed, and even prayed that she might have the strength to become Denis Wilde's wife; that she might taste once more of peace, if not of joy; and yet all her longings and all her prayers only made her realize the more how utterly the thing was beyond her power.

To Maurice, and Maurice alone, belonged her life and her soul, and Vera felt that it would be easier for her to be true to the sad, dim memory of his love than to give her heart and her allegiance to any other upon earth.

So she sat and mused, and pondered, and the amber light in the east faded away into palest saffron, and the solemn shadows deepened and lengthened upon the still bosom of the water.

Suddenly there came a sharp footstep and the rustle of a woman's silken skirts across the stone flags behind her. She looked up quickly; Helen stood beside her. Helen, in all the sheen of her gay Paris garments, with the evening light upon her uncovered head, and the glow of a pa.s.sion, fiercer than madness, in her glittering eyes. Some prescience of evil--she knew not of what--made Vera spring to her feet.

Helen spoke to her shortly and defiantly.

"Miss Nevill, you are waiting here for my husband, are you not?"

A faint flush rose in Vera's face.