CHAPTER XXXI.
ON THE BRINK.
Major Gordon left Pevenshall by the mail, and on the following morning Cecil bade adieu to her friend, who was rather inclined to resent her abrupt departure.
"I don't believe a bit in Mr. O'Boyneville's summons," said Flo; "you are tired of us, and you want to go away, Cecil; you are deceiving me just as you deceived me before. However, of course I cannot keep you here against your will; and I can only regret that we have not succeeded in making you happy."
Whereupon Cecil declared that Pevenshall was all that is delightful; and that she should never forget Mrs. Lobyer's kindness and affection. The impulsive Florence would upon this have embraced her friend; but Cecil drew herself away from the embrace.
"Wherever you go, dear, I shall remember you and your goodness," she said; "and oh, Florence, I hope you will be happy."
As the two women stood for a moment holding each other's hands, and looking in each other's faces, Cecil would fain have uttered some word of warning to the friend she never thought to see again. But she remembered what a mockery any warning must seem hereafter from her tainted lips; though who so well as this poor shipwrecked creature, newly foundered on a rock, could tell of the dangers that beset a woman's pathway? Holding Mrs. Lobyer's hand silently in her own, she fancied how her friend would remember that parting when her own name had become a byword and reproach.
"Will she have any pity upon me, I wonder, for the sake of our past friendship; or will she be as merciless as the rest of the world?"
This is what Cecil thought in that parting moment, while her packages were being put in the carriage, and the imperturbable footman attended with her shawls and parasols.
"You will come to us at Christmas," cried Flo.
"I fear not, dear. Good-bye."
Cecil was seated in the carriage in the next minute, waving her hand to Florence, and a little group of young ladies who had placed themselves at the hall-door to witness her departure. Splendid Pevenshall swam before her in a mist as she looked at that group of light-hearted girls fluttering like a cluster of butterflies in the morning sunshine.
"I shall never again pass the threshold of such a house," she thought.
All through the homeward journey, she felt like a traveller in a dream. She sat in a corner of the carriage with her eyes fixed upon the changing landscape; but she saw only a confusion of undulating corn-fields and summer verdure.
She went mechanically through the business of her arrival, and reached Brunswick Square without accident; but the clamour of the London streets sounded in her ears like the booming of a stormy sea.
An unearthly quiet seemed to pervade the Bloomsbury Mansion. The respectful Pupkin uttered some faint exclamation of surprise on beholding his mistress; but beyond this Cecil heard neither voice nor sound. She avoided her own apartments while they were being prepared for her reception, and went straight to the drawing-rooms, where every thing remained exactly as she had left it five or six weeks before. The birds set up a feeble rejoicing as they recognised their mistress; but she did not approach the window where their cages hung in the London sunshine.
She looked at her watch; her life to-day was a question of hours. She had her packing to accomplish—a painful kind of packing, for it involved the setting aside of every trinket her husband had ever given her. She intended to take with her only the plainest dresses and the absolute necessaries of her toilet; she doubted whether even these things could be really hers when once she crossed the threshold of that house. There seemed to be a kind of dishonesty in taking with her the most insignificant trifle that had been bought with Laurence O'Boyneville's money.
There was one task before Lady Cecil even more painful than the preparations for her journey, and that task was the writing of the letter which should tell Mr. O'Boyneville that his wife had decided on leaving him. How could she do it? how could she put her wickedness into words? what could she say to him? "You have never been unkind to me; I have no accusation to bring against you; you have only been unsympathetic; and a man whom I love better than truth and honour has persuaded me to abandon you."
Never in all her life had Cecil suffered such anguish as the writing of that letter cost her. It seemed a cold, hard, cruel letter when it was written, so curtly did it announce her guilty design; but though there was little trace of feeling in the written lines, the slow tears rolled down her pallid cheeks as she wrote, and her hand trembled so violently that it was with difficulty she could make her writing legible.
"Oh Hector!" she cried piteously; "if you could know what I suffer for your sake—for your sake!"
Somehow or other the letter was written, sealed, and addressed; and then she sat looking at it in a kind of stupor.
"If it were really not too late—if I dared ask him to release me," she thought.
But in the next moment she remembered the solemn nature of her promise, the sacrifice her lover had made to win it.
"Oh, no, no, no!" she cried; "it is too late! I am bound to him by my promise."
And then she asked herself whether, if there had been no such promise, she could have remained in that house as Laurence O'Boyneville's wife. She had wronged him so much in word and in thought, that her innocence of deeper and more irrevocable wrong seemed to be of little moment. Could she look in his face without humiliation? Could she accept his confidence without dishonour? No! a thousand times no; and this being so, she was no wife for him.
"Come what may, I must leave my husband," she thought. "Oh, if I could go alone! if I could only go away by myself to some quiet hiding-place, and never be heard of any more!"
She thought this in all sincerity. Her love for the tempter had been in a great measure annihilated by the horror of the temptation. The sense of her guilt was so great an agony that there was little room in her mind for any other feeling. It seemed as if the current of Fate was drifting her along, and that she was no more than a weed, carried onward by an impetuous torrent. She knew that destruction lay before her; but she had no power to resist the force of the stream.
After the writing of the letter, she sat for some time in a listless attitude, looking vacantly at the envelope with her husband's name upon it. Her head ached with a dull pain, and there was confusion in her thoughts. She could not ponder deliberately upon the step that she was going to take. This inability to think quietly had possessed her ever since she had arrived at the fatal conclusion to which her lover had urged her. She had accepted the doctrine of necessity; she had allowed herself to be persuaded that it was her destiny to do wrong; and once having yielded to this unnatural creed, the false god she had created was stronger than herself, and she became indeed a powerless creature in the hands of Fate.
Apollo had spoken; sorrow and shame lay before her, her inevitable portion.
The day crept on, and she knew that with every hour the current that was drifting her gathered new strength. Hector was to devote this day to the settlement of his own affairs; for a man has need to make some little preparation on the eve of an exile that may last his lifetime. The day crept on—a dull sultry day at the close of August—and still Cecil kept her listless attitude by the table with her husband's letter lying before her. She knew that she was not to expect any visit from Hector until late in the afternoon, since the business he had to transact would occupy the best part of his day. But though she was lonely and wretched, she felt no eagerness for his coming. What relief or consolation could he bring her? What was he but her accomplice in wrong, with whom she had plotted a crime, and to whom she was pledged for the due accomplishment of that evil deed?
Amid the many thoughts that succeeded one another in the confusion of her brain, there was the thought that guilty wretches who had plotted the details of a murder must feel very much as she felt to-day. She could fancy them, when all had been planned, and the hour appointed, waiting in weary idleness for the time to come. She could fancy them watching the slow hands upon the dial, and wishing either that time could come to a dead stop for ever and ever, or that the hour had arrived and the deed were done. The stillness of the house seemed to her like the stillness that precedes death and horror. She fancied her husband coming home from his journey in a day or two to find the same dull quiet in the house, and his wife's letter waiting for him on the table.
"If he loved me, the blow would kill him," she thought; "but he does not love me. His profession is all the world to him. If he had loved me, I think it would have been easy for me to confess my wickedness and ask his forgiveness. He will be sorry, perhaps,—more sorry for me than for himself,—but his grief will not last long. He will have Westminster Hall, and his hope of getting into Parliament. He is not like Hector; he would never have allowed his love for me to interfere with his career."
It was nearly five o'clock when she aroused herself from this miserable apathy and went to her room to begin the preparations for to-morrow's flight. She was to dine at half-past six, so she had brief leisure for her work. One by one she set aside the jewels that her husband had given her. They were not very numerous, but they were valuable, and in a simple taste that did credit to Mr. O'Boyneville's judgment.
Like that wretched wife in Kotzebue's tragedy, Lady Cecil could not fail to remember the occasion on which each gift had been presented. The emerald-and-diamond bracelet on her birthday; the cameos in Etruscan setting on the anniversary of her marriage; the suite of turquoise rings and bracelets in solid bands of lustreless gold, bestowed upon her in commemoration of some professional triumph of Mr. O'Boyneville's, as grand in its way as Erskine's defence of Hardy. The thought of her husband's quiet pleasure in these offerings came back to her as she touched them.
"I think he must have loved me then," she murmured, as she remembered the evening on which he had taken the case of cameos from his pocket to lay it on the little table by which she sat at work. He had loved her a little at that time, she thought! he had loved her a little when he sought her as his wife; but always with that moderate and negative affection for which alone there is room in the breast of a man who devotes himself to an arduous profession. It had not been given to Cecil to understand the possibility of hidden fires burning steadily beneath the dull outward crust of the working man's nature. She did not know the capacity for deep and passionate feeling which may exist in the nature of a man whose daily labour leaves him no leisure for the revelation of the better and brighter part of his mind. She had expected to find a husband only an improved edition of a lover; and finding him something altogether different—a creature who accepted her affection as a matter of course, and was disagreeably candid on the subject of an unbecoming bonnet,—she concluded all at once that she was no longer beloved, and that her life was desolate.
The dismal dinner-hour had arrived by the time she had collected the trinkets in her jewel-case, and had packed two or three dresses and her most indispensable possessions in the one trunk which she was to take with her. She went to the dining-room, and made a miserable pretence of dining, with the inestimable Pupkin in attendance, and the evening sunlight shining into the dingy pictures on the wall opposite to her. Every thing in Brunswick Square looked unspeakably dull and faded and dusty after the splendour of Pevenshall. She thought of the moonlit terrace, and the fair summer landscape sanctified by the night. The very tones of Hector Gordon's passionate pleading came back to her ears; but they moved her with no answering thrill of passion; her love had perished in the misery which it had brought upon her. She thought of that little village in Brittany which he had described to her so eloquently; the rustic retreat in which they were to spend the first few months of their union—oh God, what a union! A vague horror was mingled even with the thought of that pine-clad mountain and the purple sea. Her lover had dwelt so fondly on the beauty of the scene; and yet, in Brunswick Square, with the summer sunshine coming to her on a slanting column of dust, and with a street-organ droning in the distance, she thought of that far-away paradise with a shudder. In this crisis of her fate, she felt like a creature standing between two lives—the dull slow river of commonplace existence; the stormy ocean of passion and guilt. She looked backward to the river with a vague yearning; she looked forward to the ocean with an unutterable fear.
The shadowy banquet occupied less than half an hour, and it was only seven o'clock when Cecil went back to the drawing-room. Seven: he would be with her soon! He too would have made his pretence of dining, no doubt, at one of his clubs. The crisis in a well-bred man's fate must be desperate indeed when he abandons that pretence of dining, or faces the universe with a reckless toilet. Seven. The windows were open; the canaries were making a discordant scraping with their beaks against the wires of the cages, and noisy children were emerging from the square. Cecil looked down at them from her window, and remembered the stories she had heard of women who had run away from such households as those. She remembered one especial history,—the wretched story of a woman who abandoned her husband and children under the influence of an infatuation which remained an unsolvable mystery to the last. It was from Brighton that the hapless creature took flight; and she told one of the few friends who remained to her after that time, how at the last, just as she had crossed the threshold of her husband's house, she heard, or fancied that she heard, a cry from one of her children, and would have gone back—would at that ultimate moment have repented and returned—if a cruel wind had not closed the door in her face, and set the seal upon her doom. She had not the courage to ring the bell. She went away to keep her tryst with the man who had made himself her master and to have her name a byword and reproach for ever after that fatal day.
The wheels of an impetuous hansom ground against the curb-stone while Lady Cecil stood at the window thinking of this dismal story; and her lover alighted from the vehicle. He stopped to pay the driver—he must have paid the driver even if he had been going to assist in the execution of a murder—and the man drove away slowly through the smoky summer gloaming, contented with his fare.
Cecil was still standing by the window when Pupkin announced Major Gordon: she turned her head and waited for her lover; and even in that moment of waiting, as he came towards her through the twilit room, she thought how different would have been her greeting of him, if she had been his wife—if she had had any right to be glad of his coming.
"My own darling!" said Hector, in a low tender voice.
She gave him her hand in silence, and he stood by her side in the window, holding the poor cold hand, and looking down at her with unutterable affection.
"My own dear girl, how pale you are in this dim light! I hope it is the light, and that you are not really looking so ill as I fancy you look. I have done every thing, dear. I have seen the lawyers, the bankers, the stockbrokers, every body; and am free to go to the end of the world,—to the very end of the world! look up, darling; let me see the face I used to dream of on my way back to India, after our parting at Fortinbras."
She lifted her head from its drooping attitude and looked at him with a countenance in which there was a mournful resignation that sent a chill to his heart.
"Oh my darling, if you could only look forward as happily to our future as I do; I know that there is much for you to suffer—just at first; but when once we are clear of England, and all the brightest countries in the universe are before us, the miserable past will fade away like a dream."
"Do you think so, Hector? Shall I ever forget—shall I ever forget?"
"Let it be considered my fault if you remember. I charge myself with the happiness of your life. You cannot blame me too bitterly if you are unhappy. And now, darling, let us discuss our plans for the last time. I hope they won't bring us lights. It is so nice to sit in this dreamy twilight. I shall always think tenderly of Brunswick Square, for the sake of this one evening, Cecil."
They sat by the open window, and Hector talked about the future. He talked about the future, which, by his showing, was to be one long idyl; and while he talked, the woman who sat by his side would fain have cast herself at his feet, crying:
"Release me from my guilty promise! Have pity upon me, and set me free!"
She would fain have done this, but she sat by his side and listened quietly to hopeful words that jarred strangely with the dull anguish which had possessed her all through the long wretched day.
They were still sitting in the summer dusk, when a firmer footstep than Pupkin's sounded on the landing-place, and the door suddenly opened.
"Laurence!" cried Cecil, starting to her feet, as she recognised the stalwart figure in the doorway.
It was indeed Mr. O'Boyneville, with the dust of travel upon him. He took his wife in his arms and kissed her tenderly; and he gave friendly greeting to Major Gordon, but he did not offer his hand to that gentleman.
"Pupkin told me of your return," he said to Cecil; "what brought you back so unexpectedly?"
It was some moments before Cecil answered, and even then she could not reply without hesitation.
"I was so tired of Pevenshall."
"Tired of Pevenshall! I thought you were enjoying yourself so much there. Well, dear, you were quite right to come back if you were tired. Let us have the lights, and some tea."
The barrister went to the fireplace to ring one of the bells. He happened to choose the bell nearest that angle of the chimneypiece on which Cecil had placed two sealed envelopes addressed to her husband. One contained the letter announcing her flight; the other the key of her jewel-case and wardrobe. Mr. O'Boyneville's piercing gaze alighted on these letters as he rang the bell.
"For me?" he asked, advancing his hand towards the two packets.
"No!" Cecil cried eagerly; "they are mine."
She snatched them from the mantelpiece and put them in her pocket, and then she seated herself by the table on which she was wont to make tea. Mr. O'Boyneville walked slowly up and down the room. Major Gordon kept his place by the open window. Nothing could be more inconvenient than this unlooked-for return of the barrister, which in all probability would interfere with the arrangements of the next day. The Major felt all the degradation of his position, but was determined to hold his ground nevertheless. The barrister would most likely retire to his study directly after tea, and thereby afford Hector the opportunity of speaking to Cecil before he left. There was an unspeakable dreariness, a palpable desolation in that Bloomsbury drawing-room, which oppressed Hector Gordon as he stood by the window, looking sometimes out into the square where the lamps burned dimly in the grey evening light, sometimes into the dusky room, where the barrister's figure loomed large athwart the shadows. Cecil sat in a listless attitude, waiting to perform that simple house-hold duty which must seem such a mockery to her to-night. The lamps came presently, and the big plated tea-tray and old-fashioned urn, with impossible lion-heads holding rings in their mouths. The light of the lamps was painfully dazzling to her aching eyes. She began to pour out the tea mechanically, and the two men came to the table to take their cups from her hands. As they stood side by side doing this, the thought arose in her mind of that one treason which stands alone amongst all the treasons of mankind; and the figure of her lover bending over the cups and saucers blended itself horribly with the image of Judas Iscariot dipping his hand into the dish.
Mr. O'Boyneville drank his tea after his usual absent-minded fashion, staring into space as he slowly sipped the beverage. He rose after emptying his second cup and began to pace the room again, while Hector sat near the lamp-lit table watching Cecil with anxious earnest eyes.
"You scarcely expected me to-night, I suppose, Cecil?" said the barrister.
"No; I did not expect you."
"I didn't think I should return so soon; but the business I am involved in just now is a very serious one."
"Indeed!"
She spoke mechanically, feeling herself called upon to speak. Hector did not even affect any interest in Mr. O'Boyneville's conversation. A kind of sullenness had taken possession of him since the barrister's entrance; and he kept his place silently with a dogged determination to remain, knowing all the time that he had no right to be there, and that Cecil's husband had good reason to wonder at his presence.
"Yes; it is a very unpleasant business—a painful business. Of course I have only to consider the technicalities involved in it. I am consulted on a question that has arisen respecting a marriage-settlement; but when people want a counsel's opinion, they are obliged to tell him other things besides technicalities. I am very sorry for the poor woman."
"What poor woman?" asked Cecil; still because she felt herself obliged to appear interested.
"The poor deluded creature who has left her husband."
If a thunderbolt had fallen through the roof of Mr. O'Boyneville's house, Cecil could scarcely have experienced a greater shock; but she gave no utterance to her feelings. She sat pale and motionless, like some unhappy wretch at a bar of justice waiting the awful sentence.
"Ah, I forgot," said the barrister; "you don't know the story. As I said just now, it's not a pleasant story, and perhaps I ought not to talk to you about it; but I can't get it out of my head. And yet it's common enough, Heaven knows; only it seems a little worse in this case than usual, for the husband and wife had lived so happily together."
"Why did she leave him?"
This time it seemed to Cecil as if some unknown force within her compelled the question, so painful was the nature of her husband's conversation, so unwilling would she have been to continue it had she possessed the power of bringing it to an end.
"Why did she leave him?" repeated the barrister. "Who can tell? There are women in Bethlehem Hospital who believe themselves to be queens of England, and there are miserable creatures in the same asylum who have murdered families of helpless children in sudden paroxysms of madness; but not one amongst them all could seem to me more utterly mad than this woman."
"You know the husband?" said Hector Gordon. He had risen during the barrister's discourse and was standing by the mantelpiece. He felt himself in a manner called upon to take some part in this discussion, and to defend the sinners if necessary.
"Yes; I know the husband."
"Was he so devoted to his wife?"
"I am not quite sure of your idea of devotion. You see, you are a club-man, Major Gordon; you belong to the West-end and to a set of men who can afford to be what you call 'devoted.' I don't suppose you could realise the idea of a stockbroker's affection for his wife. Your City-man has very little opportunity for playing the ideal lover or the ideal husband. His wife's image may be with him even on 'Change. The details of his business are dry and dull and sordid in the eyes of other people; but he may be working for his wife all the time, and his existence may be more completely consecrated to her welfare and to her happiness than if he dawdled by her side all day on the margin of some romantic Italian lake, and only opened his lips to protest the singleness of his affection. Yes, Major Gordon, the City-man's devotion is the nobler; for it takes the form of unremitting toil and unending care, while the dawdler's love is only a shallow pretext for a sensuous laziness amidst beautiful scenery."
"I confess myself sceptical on the subject of your stockbroking Romeo," said Hector with a sneer. "With that sort of man a wife is only a superior kind of housekeeper. I don't believe in the poetry of Bartholomew Lane. Your City-man works hard because money-making is his habit, his vice, like dram-drinking; not because he wants to make a fortune for his wife and children."
"You think so?"
"Most assuredly I think so."
"And you do not believe that your hard-working man has his own bright picture of an ideal home always before his mind? I don't think you can have studied the habits of Englishmen, Major Gordon, or you would understand the City-man better. Look about you, and behold the incarnation of English prosperity in the Englishman's home. It is for that he works. It is in order to achieve that luxurious haven that he wastes the best years of his life in the smoke and dust and heat and turmoil of the commercial battle-ground. And what does his home represent, with all its splendour of pictures and furniture, and gardens and stables, but his devotion to his wife and children? Build what palace he may, his clubs will give him better rooms than he can build for himself. Whatever salary he pays his cook, there will be better cooks at the Reform or the London Tavern. But the hard-working Englishman wants a home; a dining-room in which his children may gather around him as he sips his famous claret; a drawing-room where, amidst all the splendour, there will be a corner for his wife's workbasket, a hiding-place for his baby's last new toy. And you eloquent drones of the West-end see this poor working bee—this dust-begrimed money-grub—and you say such a creature cannot know what it is to love his wife; and if the wife happens to be a pretty woman, you have neither pity nor respect for the husband. Poor, miserable, money-earning machine, what is he that he should be pitied or respected? It can be no sin to bring ruin and desolation upon such a creature's home."
"You are eloquent to-night, Mr. O'Boyneville."
"Oh, you know it is my trade to be eloquent about other people's business. I really do feel for this poor man. I have been in his house to-day: such a house—I could have fancied there had been a funeral, and that the coffin had only just been taken away; there was such palpable desolation in the place."
"And the husband," asked Cecil, with real interest this time, "was he sorry?"
"Sorry! Can you fancy the sorrow for a loss which is so much worse than death that it would be happiness to the mourner it he could awake from a dream to find his wife's coffin by his side? Sorry! Do you know what a broken life is? I do, Cecil. There are three lives ruined and broken by a woman's folly."
"Let the man who loves her bear the full burden of his guilt," said Hector eagerly. "Let him be responsible for the issue."
"God help him, poor creature!" cried the barrister.
"You pity him?"
"How can I help pitying him? You read of such a case in the papers, and think perhaps that the seducer is a very fine fellow. He has persuaded a silly woman to make her name a public disgrace, and he has destroyed an honest man's existence. All that sounds very heroic. People wonder what diabolical charm the villain possessed. There are piquant paragraphs about him in the papers: a social leader holding him up to the execration of the million, but with a little flourish of poetry and passion for his glorification notwithstanding; and if his photograph could be published while his misdeeds had the gloss of novelty upon them, it would sell by thousands. But have you ever thought about the lives of these people after the nine-days' wonder is over, and they slip out of the public mind? Then comes the chastisement: then comes the old classic retribution: evil for evil, evil for evil. The man who did not scruple to destroy the entire scheme of another man's existence finds his own life wasted and broken. What is the universe for him henceforward?—a solitude, with the one wretched creature whom he has chosen for his companion."
"There can be no such thing as solitude with the woman he loves."
"The man who outrages honour and defies society will find his home something worse than a solitude—a prison, in which two galley-slaves pace to and fro, dragging at the hateful chain that links them together. Let the seducer love his victim never so fondly, the time too surely comes in which he learns to hate her. The time comes when the voice of a forgotten ambition reminds him how much he has sacrificed—for what? for the pale face of a penitent, whose wan eyes are filled with involuntary tears at the sight of the humblest peasant woman walking by her husband's side."
"A man must be a dastard who could count any sacrifice made for the woman he loves," said the Major.
"The man who steals another man's wife is a dastard," answered Mr. O'Boyneville. "Sooner or later he will count the cost of his folly; and the woman who has staked her salvation against the love of this one creature will awake some day to find that the game is lost. She will see the reflection of her own remorse in her lover's face, blended with something worse than remorse. She will watch his dreary, purposeless life, spent in a foreign country, under a false name most likely; and she will think what he might have been but for her. Heaven help her! She must have a servile love of life for its own sake if she does not creep quietly from the house some dusky evening to drown herself in the nearest river. Nothing but her death can set her lover free; and even her death cannot extinguish the disgrace she has inflicted on her husband's name."
A half-stifled sob sounded through the room as the barrister came to a full stop. He went to his wife and found her crying, with her hands clasped before her face.
"Forgive me, my dear," he said gently; "I forgot that this sort of story was not the thing to speak of before you. I let myself talk as if I were in court.—Why are you going away, Major? my wife will be better presently. We won't say any thing more about these miserable runaways.—Look up, Cecil. There, you are all right now.—Must you really go?"
This question was addressed to Hector, who had taken up his hat, and was waiting to make his adieux.
"Yes; it is ten o'clock. I will call upon Lady Cecil to-morrow. I—I have something particular to say to her."
"Then I'm afraid that you must defer the something particular for a week or two. I'm going to take my wife to Devonshire by an early train to-morrow. Good-night; but I'm coming down to my study, so I can let you out myself."
"Good-night, Lady Cecil."
"Good-night."
The words were scarcely audible. She rose as she gave him her hand, and they stood for a few moments face to face, while Mr. O'Boyneville walked towards the door; Hector mutely imploring some sign, Cecil looking at him with a blank stupefied expression. To leave her thus, and on such a night—the night which was to have been the eve of a new life—was unspeakable anguish. But he had no alternative; the barrister's eye was upon him; and a word, a look might have betrayed the woman he loved. He had no opportunity to ascertain whether to-morrow's appointment at the railway-station was to be kept, or whether Mr. O'Boyneville's return was to hinder Cecil's flight. He could only take his departure after the fashion of the most commonplace visitor, and must trust all to-morrow's schemes and to-morrow's hopes to the chapter of accidents.
"Good-night, Lady Cecil," he repeated; and he tried to put as much meaning into those two words as can be infused into any two syllables of the English language.
Mr. O'Boyneville conducted his guest to the street door, and lingered on the threshold with him a few moments talking pleasantly.
"You really think of going to the West of England to-morrow?" asked the Major. There is no such thing as honour when a man is engaged in a dishonourable cause; and not being able to talk to the wife, Hector Gordon was fain to extract the information he required from the husband.
"Yes," answered Mr. O'Boyneville; "I have business in that part of the country; and as my wife is not looking well, I shall take her with me. A week or two at Clovelly, or some sea-coast village will set her up."
"Shall you start early?"
"Yes; by the eight-o'clock train."
Half-past eight was the hour for the Dover mail, and at a quarter-past Cecil and Hector were to have met at the station. All had been planned by the Major. She was to have told her servants that she was going into Hampshire to join her aunt, and was to have ordered a hack-cab to take her to the station. All had been thought of; but now delay was inevitable, and Hector had a presentiment that in this case delay meant the ruin of his hopes. He bade good-night to the barrister, and went away from the quiet Bloomsbury quarter with a heavy heart.
Mr. O'Boyneville smiled as he closed the door upon the departing visitor. "Thank God it's all over so quietly!" he muttered to himself. "It was best to take matters coolly. It would always have been open to me to blow his brains out."
The barrister did not go to his study: he went back to the drawing-room, where he found his wife lying prostrate on the spot where Hector Gordon had bade her adieu. He lifted her in his arms, and carried her up stairs as easily as if she had been an infant.
He rang for one of the maids to attend on his unconscious wife; but before doing so, and before making any effort to restore Cecil from her fainting fit, he deliberately picked her pocket of the two letters which she had taken from the mantelpiece. Rapid as her movement had been when she took possession of these two packets, the barrister's piercing glances had discovered that they were addressed to himself.
"It's better that I should have them than any one else," he said, as he transferred the letters to his own pocket.
He left Cecil in the care of the housemaid, and sent for a medical man who had occasionally attended his wife. All that night he sat by Cecil's bed-side, and through the greater part of the next day he still kept his post. There was no journey to Devonshire; and Hector Gordon, calling day by day in Brunswick Square, with a desperate defiance of appearances, was apt to find a doctor's brougham standing at the door, and for some time received an invariable answer from Pupkin—"Lady Cecil O'Boyneville was still very ill."
It was a long wearisome illness; a low fever, with frequent delirium, and a most terrible languor of mind and body. But slow and wearisome as the malady was in its nature, Laurence O'Boyneville knew no such thing as fatigue. He nursed his wife as tenderly as ever mother nursed her fading child; snatching his broken sleep or his hasty meal how and where he could, and carrying a bag full of briefs for the coming term to the sick chamber, there to read and ponder in the dead of the night, with ears always on the alert for the faintest variation in the low breathing of the beloved sleeper, and with his watch open before him to mark the hour when medicines were to be administered. The hired nurse who performed the commoner duties of the sick chamber, snored peacefully in Cecil's dressing-room during the dismal night-watch, and was loud in her praises of the husband's devotion,—"which if there was more like him, our dooties wouldn't be that wearin' as they are, and there'd be less complaints of givin' way to stimilants; and gentlemen which should be above blackenin' a pore woman's character would have no call to throw their Sairy Gampses and Betsy Prigses in a lone female's face," said this member of the Gamp species.