She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her weep. Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had been more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over the deeps, perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her tears--for Lady Romfrey tasked it very severely: but he from whom she could hope for no release, gave her some of the firmness which her nature craved in this trial.

From saying quietly to her: 'I thought once you loved him,' when alluding to Nevil, Lady Romfrey pa.s.sed to mournful exclamations, and by degrees on to direct entreaties. She related the whole story of Renee in England, and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at Cecilia's mildness after hearing it. Her hearer would have imagined that she had no moral sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the poor lady's mind was distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp.

Cecilia's high conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of our English civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not explain it. She bowed to Lady Romfrey's praises of Nevil, suffered her hands to be wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her love of him to be wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her cold resolution to marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In truth, it was too late to speak of Renee to her now. It did not beseem Cecilia to remember that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and while confessing to many errors, because she felt them, and gained a necessary strength from them--in the comfort of the consciousness of pain, for example, which she sorely needed, that the pain in her own breast might deaden her to Nevil's jealousy, the meanest of the errors of a lofty soul, yielded no extract beyond the bare humiliation proper to an acknowledgement that it had existed: so she discarded the recollection of the pa.s.sion which had wrought the mischief. Since we cannot have a peerless flower of civilization without artificial aid, it may be understood how it was that Cecilia could extinguish some lights in her mind and kindle others, and wherefore what it was not natural for her to do, she did. She had, briefly, a certain control of herself.

Our common readings in the fict.i.tious romances which mark out a plot and measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful of the effect of that story of Renee. A wooden young woman, or a galvanized (sweet to the writer, either of them, as to the reader--so moveable they are!) would have seen her business at this point, and have glided melting to reconciliation and the chamber where romantic fiction ends joyously. Rosamund had counted on it.

She looked intently at Cecilia. 'He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he has lost you--I am the cause!' she cried in a convulsion of grief.

'Dear Lady Romfrey!' Cecilia would have consoled her. 'There is nothing to lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not to blame for anything: how can you be?'

'I spoke falsely of Dr. Shrapnel; I am the cause. It lies on me! it pursues me. Let me give to the poor as I may, and feel for the poor, as I do, to get nearer to Nevil--I cannot have peace! His heart has turned from me. He despises me. If I had spoken to Lord Romfrey at Steynham, as he commanded me, you and he--Oh! cowardice: he is right, cowardice is the chief evil in the world. He is ill; he is desperately ill; he will die.'

'Have you heard he is very ill, Lady Romfrey?'

'No! no!' Rosamund exclaimed; 'it is by not hearing that I know it!'

With the a.s.sistance of Louise Devereux, Cecilia gradually awakened to what was going on in the house. There had been a correspondence between Miss Denham and the countess. Letters from Bevisham had suddenly ceased.

Presumably the earl had stopped them: and if so it must have been for a tragic reason.

Cecilia hinted some blame of Lord Romfrey to her father.

He pressed her hand and said: 'You don't know what that man suffers.

Romfrey is fond of Nevil too, but he must guard his wife; and the fact is Nevil is down with fever. It 's in the papers now; he may be able to conceal it, and I hope he will. There'll be a crisis, and then he can tell her good news--a little illness and all right now! Of course,'

the colonel continued buoyantly, 'Nevil will recover; he's a tough wiry young fellow, but poor Romfrey's fears are natural enough about the countess. Her mind seems to be haunted by the doctor there--Shrapnel, I mean; and she's exciteable to a degree that threatens the worst--in case of any accident in Bevisham.'

'Is it not a kind of cowardice to conceal it?' Cecilia suggested.

'It saves her from fretting,' said the colonel.

'But she is fretting! If Lord Romfrey would confide in her and trust to her courage, papa, it would be best.'

Colonel Halkett thought that Lord Romfrey was the judge.

Cecilia wished to leave a place where this visible torture of a human soul was proceeding, and to no purpose. She pointed out to her father, by a variety of signs, that Lady Romfrey either knew or suspected the state of affairs in Bevisham, and repeated her remarks upon Nevil's illness. But Colonel Halkett was restrained from departing by the earl's constant request to him to stay. Old friendship demanded it of him. He began to share his daughter's feelings at the sight of Lady Romfrey. She was outwardly patient and submissive; by nature she was a strong healthy woman; and she attended to all her husband's prescriptions for the regulating of her habits, walked with him, lay down for the afternoon's rest, appeared amused when he laboured to that effect, and did her utmost to subdue the worm devouring her heart but the hours of the delivery of the letter-post were fatal to her. Her woeful: 'No letter for me!' was piteous. When that was heard no longer, her silence and famished gaze chilled Cecilia. At night Rosamund eyed her husband expressionlessly, with her head leaning back in her chair, to the sorrow of the ladies beholding her. Ultimately the contagion of her settled misery took hold of Cecilia. Colonel Halkett was induced by his daughter and Mrs. Devereux to endeavour to combat a system that threatened consequences worse than those it was planned to avert. He by this time was aware of the serious character of the malady which had prostrated Nevil. Lord Romfrey had directed his own medical man to go down to Bevisham, and Dr. Gannet's report of Nevil was grave. The colonel made light of it to his daughter, after the fashion he condemned in Lord Romfrey, to whom however he spoke earnestly of the necessity for partially taking his wife into his confidence to the extent of letting her know that a slight fever was running its course with Nevil.

'There will be no slight fever in my wife's blood,' said the earl. 'I stand to weather the cape or run to wreck, and it won't do to be taking in reefs on a lee-sh.o.r.e. You don't see what frets her, colonel. For years she has been bent on Nevil's marriage. It's off: but if you catch Cecilia by the hand and bring her to us--I swear she loves the fellow!--that's the medicine for my wife. Say: will you do it? Tell Lady Romfrey it shall be done. We shall stand upright again!'

'I'm afraid that's impossible, Romfrey,' said the colonel.

'Play at it, then! Let her think it. You're helping me treat an invalid.

Colonel! my old friend! You save my house and name if you do that. It's a hand round a candle in a burst of wind. There's Nevil dragged by a woman into one of their reeking hovels--so that Miss Denham at Shrapnel's writes to Lady Romfrey--because the woman's drunken husband voted for him at the Election, and was kicked out of employment, and fell upon the gin-bottle, and the brats of the den died starving, and the man sickened of a fever; and Nevil goes in and sits with him! Out of that tangle of folly is my house to be struck down? It looks as if the fellow with his infernal "humanity," were the bad genius of an old nurse's tale. He's a good fellow, colonel, he means well. This fever will cure him, they say it sobers like bloodletting. He's a gallant fellow; you know that. He fought to the skeleton in our last big war.

On my soul, I believe he's good for a husband. Frenchwoman or not, that affair's over. He shall have Steynham and Holdesbury. Can I say more?

Now, colonel, you go in to the countess. Grasp my hand. Give me that help, and G.o.d bless you! You light up my old days. She's a n.o.ble woman: I would not change her against the best in the land. She has this craze about Nevil. I suppose she'll never get over it. But there it is: and we must feed her with the spoon.'

Colonel Halkett argued stutteringly with the powerful man: 'It's the truth she ought to hear, Romfrey; indeed it is, if you 'll believe me.

It 's his life she is fearing for. She knows half.'

'She knows positively nothing, colonel. Miss Denham's first letter spoke of the fellow's having headaches, and staggering. He was out on a cruise, and saw your schooner pa.s.s, and put into some port, and began falling right and left, and they got him back to Shrapnel's: and here it is--that if you go to him you'll save him, and if you go to my wife you'll save her: and there you have it: and I ask my old friend, I beg him to go to them both.'

'But you can't surely expect me to force my daughter's inclinations, my dear Romfrey?'

'Cecilia loves the fellow!'

'She is engaged to Mr. Tuckham.'

'I'll see the man Tuckham.'

'Really, my dear lord!'

'Play at it, Halkett, play at it! Tide us over this! Talk to her: hint it and nod it. We have to round November. I could strangle the world till that month's past. You'll own,' he added mildly after his thunder, 'I'm not much of the despot Nevil calls me. She has not a wish I don't supply. I'm at her beck, and everything that's mine. She's a brave good woman. I don't complain. I run my chance. But if we lose the child--good night! Boy or girl!--boy!'

Lord Romfrey flung an arm up. The child of his old age lived for him already: he gave it all the life he had. This miracle, this young son springing up on an earth decaying and dark, absorbed him. This reviver of his ancient line must not be lost. Perish every consideration to avert it! He was ready to fear, love, or hate terribly, according to the prospects of his child.

Colonel Halkett was obliged to enter into a consultation, of a shadowy sort, with his daughter, whose only advice was that they should leave the castle. The penetrable gloom there, and the growing apprehension concerning the countess and Nevil, tore her to pieces. Even if she could have conspired with the earl to hoodwink his wife, her strong sense told her it would be fruitless, besides base. Father and daughter had to make the stand against Lord Romfrey. He saw their departure from the castle gates, and kissed his hand to Cecilia, courteously, without a smile.

'He may well praise the countess, papa,' said Cecilia, while they were looking back at the castle and the moveless flag that hung in folds by the mast above it. 'She has given me her promise to avoid questioning him and to accept his view of her duty. She said to me that if Nevil should die she...'

Cecilia herself broke down, and gave way to sobs in her father's arms.

CHAPTER XLIX. A FABRIC OF BARONIAL DESPOTISM CRUMBLE

The earl's precautions did duty night and day in all the avenues leading to the castle and his wife's apartments; and he could believe that he had undertaken as good a defence as the mountain guarding the fertile vale from storms: but him the elements pelted heavily. Letters from acquaintances of Nevil, from old shipmates and from queer political admirers and opponents, hailed on him; things not to be frigidly read were related of the fellow.

Lord Romfrey's faith in the power of const.i.tution to beat disease battled st.u.r.dily with the daily reports of his physician and friends, whom he had directed to visit the cottage on the common outside Bevisham, and with Miss Denham's intercepted letters to the countess.

Still he had to calculate on the various injuries Nevil had done to his const.i.tution, which had made of him another sort of man for a struggle of life and death than when he stood like a riddled flag through the war. That latest freak of the fellow's, the abandonment of our natural and wholesome sustenance in animal food, was to be taken in the reckoning. Dr. Gannet did not allude to it; the Bevisham doctor did; and the earl meditated with a fury of wrath on the dismal chance that such a folly as this of one old vegetable idiot influencing a younger noodle, might strike his House to the dust.

His watch over his wife had grown mechanical: he failed to observe that her voice was missing. She rarely spoke. He lost the art of observing himself: the wrinkling up and dropping of his brows became his habitual language. So long as he had not to meet inquiries or face tears, he enjoyed the sense of security. He never quitted his wife save to walk to the Southern park lodge, where letters and telegrams were piled awaiting him; and she was forbidden to take the air on the castle terrace without his being beside her, lest a whisper, some accident of the kind that donkeys who nod over their drowsy nose-length-ahead precautions call fatality, should rouse her to suspect, and in a turn of the hand undo his labour: for the race was getting terrible: Death had not yet stepped out of that evil chamber in Dr. Shrapnel's cottage to aim his javelin at the bosom containing the prized young life to come, but, like the smoke of waxing fire, he shadowed forth his presence in wreaths blacker and thicker day by day: and Everard Romfrey knew that the hideous beast of darkness had only to spring up and pa.s.s his guard to deal a blow to his House the direr from all he supposed himself to have gained by masking it hitherto. The young life he looked to for renewal swallowed him: he partly lost human feeling for his wife in the tremendous watch and strain to hurry her as a vessel round the dangerous headland. He was oblivious that his eyebrows talked, that his head was bent low, that his mouth was shut, and that where a doubt had been sown, silence and such signs are like revelations in black night to the spirit of a woman who loves.

One morning after breakfast Rosamund hung on his arm, eyeing him neither questioningly nor invitingly, but long. He kissed her forehead. She clung to him and closed her eyes, showing him a face of slumber, like a mask of the dead.

Mrs. Devereux was present. Cecilia had entreated her to stay with Lady Romfrey. She stole away, for the time had come which any close observer of the countess must have expected.

The earl lifted his wife, and carried her to her sitting-room. A sunless weltering September day whipped the window-panes and brought the roar of the beaten woods to her ears. He was booted and gaitered for his customary walk to the park lodge, and as he bent a knee beside her, she murmured: 'Don't wait; return soon.'

He placed a cord attached to the bellrope within her reach. This utter love of Nevil Beauchamp was beyond his comprehension, but there it was, and he had to submit to it and manoeuvre. His letters and telegrams told the daily tale. 'He's better,' said the earl, preparing himself to answer what his wife's look had warned him would come.

She was an image of peace, in the same posture on the couch where he had left her, when he returned. She did not open her eyes, but felt about for his hand, and touching it, she seemed to weigh the fingers.

At last she said: 'The fever should be at its height.'

'Why, my dear brave girl, what ails you?' said he.

'Ignorance.'

She raised her eyelids. His head was bent down over her, like a raven's watching, a picture of gravest vigilance.