CHAPTER XXXII.—A GLIMPSE AT THE GREEN-EYED MONSTER.
Having consoled himself by a canter in Rotten Row, for the minor martyrdom he had undergone in his pursuit of the fine-arts, as misrepresented by the Amalgamated Amateurs, Harry made the best of his way to Park Lane. As he entered, a note was handed to him by the pompous butler, who took the opportunity to inform him, in a voice husky with the bee’s-wing, from which his throat was never entirely free, that “dinner would be served in a quarter of an hour.”—“Then I’ve no time to lose,” was the reply, and without looking at the note, Harry dashed up stairs, three steps at a time. On reaching his room, however, and finding that Alice’s toilet was by no means in an alarming state of forwardness, he recovered his composure, and opened the note; it ran as follows:—
“On my arrival here two hours ago, I was surprised and embarrassed by hearing that you and your bride are staying in the house. Had I been aware of this fact, I need scarcely tell you I would have delayed making my appearance until your visit should have ended. But, although I knew you had married a connection of Mrs. Crane, such a probability never occurred to me. However, it was not likely that, mixing in the same grade of society, we should pass through life without ever again encountering each other; and I am still weak enough to dread our first meeting, and to wish it over. I know your generous nature, and feel the utmost confidence that the past will remain a secret between us. It will, perhaps, be better—easier for us both, not to pretend to meet as strangers. An accidental travelling acquaintance will sufficiently account for our knowing the same places, people, &c. For your own sake, as well as mine.
“I implore you to be careful—I have never forgotten your advice, and have striven to act upon it—but mine is a rebellious nature. Destroy this note as soon as you have read it.
“Arabella.”
With stern compressed lips and knitted brow, Harry perused this mysterious epistle, and when he had finished it, crushed it in his hand and threw it on the fire with a gesture of impatience.
“Your letter does not seem to please you,” observed Alice; “does it come from a dun, or is there a screw loose (don’t I get on with my slang!) in the stable or the kennel?”
Absorbed in thought, Harry made her no reply, until, surprised and slightly annoyed at his silence, she resumed—
“Has the mysterious epistle stricken you dumb, or have we become so thoroughly matrimonial, that you don’t consider it worth while to answer your wife when she asks you a question?”
“Eh! what? I beg your pardon, dear, the letter? no it was not from a dun. I never was preyed upon by those vampires, thank Heaven; ‘out of debt, out of danger,’ has always been my motto,” replied Coverdale, rousing from his reverie.
“If it was not from a dun, whom was it from then?” continued Alice, pertinaciously.
“You are singularly curious all of a sudden,” rejoined Harry; “all I shall tell you about the matter is that the note referred to a disagreeable affair which happened three or four years ago, and which I had hoped was entirely passed and forgotten.”
“And having raised my curiosity thus, do you actually mean to say that you will not gratify it farther?” inquired Alice.
“As you can have no good reason for asking, and as I have a very good and sufficient one for keeping my own counsel, I am afraid I must leave you in ignorance,” was Harry’s tantalizing reply.
Alice glanced at his face, and reading there that he was in earnest, and meant to act on what he had said, pouted like a spoilt child who had been refused some coveted plaything, while Coverdale betook himself to his dressing-room in a “who-the-deuce-would-have-thought-of-her-turning-up!” frame of mind, from which he had by no means recovered when, with his wife, still mildly vindictive, hanging on his arm, he descended to the drawing-room.
There they found Mr. and Mrs. Crane, and a lady whom Kate introduced as her old and particular friend, Miss Crofton. Having bowed to Alice, Miss Crofton turned towards Harry, observing to Kate, as she did so—
“I have never had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Coverdale before; but Mr. Coverdale and I are old acquaintances; when I was travelling in Italy with the Muirs. Mr. Coverdale was also indulging his taste for the fine-arts, and we encountered each other at several points of the route.”
As she spoke she held out her hand to Coverdale, who, after a moment’s hesitation, and with a slight accession of colour, just touched and immediately relinquished it, saying, in a cold but polite tone of voice—
“Do you know whether the Muirs are in England now, Miss Crofton?”
As the person addressed remarked his look and tone, she pressed her lips together so forcibly that every trace of red vanished from them; but repressing all other sign of emotion, she replied to his question. Then taking a seat next Alice, she began cultivating her good graces with a degree of tact and talent which evinced her powers of shining in society, and deserved more success than it appeared to meet with.
Arabella Crofton was a handsome woman of thirty, looking younger than her age. She was tall, and her figure was fully developed without being actually embonpoint. Her hands and feet, although proportioned to her height, were beautifully modelled, and the former unusually white and soft. In feature she resembled Kate, so much so that she had more than once been mistaken for her former pupil’s elder sister; but the expression of the two faces was totally dissimilar. In Kate Crane a fiery passionate nature was kept under control by an equally strong degree of pride, and an amount of self-respect which served her in place of a higher principle; in Arabella Crofton lay concealed even a greater depth of passion, but its sole antagonist was an intellect keen, strong, and acute, though not of the highest order, and a determination of will and fixity of purpose which, while it led her straight towards the object she sought, rendered her somewhat unscrupulous as to the means by which it was to be attained; and as the mind usually writes itself more or less legibly on the countenance, so did the expression differ in Kate and her late governess. Still Miss Crofton’s was a face to attract and rivet attention, a face which exercised a species of fascination over those who beheld it, so peculiar that it is not easy to define it. As you gazed upon it, you felt that you were in the presence of an intelligence of no common order, but of whose nature, hopes, fears, wishes, and designs, you were entirely ignorant—nay, in regard to which you could not decide whether the good or evil principle predominated. In this sense of power with which she impressed others, together with the uncertainty how it might be directed, lay the secret of much of Arabella Crofton’e influence. Alice, not being metaphysical, did not attempt to define the sensations with which her new acquaintance inspired her; had she done so, it might have appeared that she had formed much the same estimate of her manner and appearance as that with which we have furnished the reader. But if Alice did not moralize, she arrived at strong and definite conclusions without that process, for before she had been half an hour in Miss Crofton’s company, she felt morally convinced that she should hate her, and that it would turn out that the ci-devant governess either had done, or was about to do, something which would completely account for and justify this sudden animosity.
During dinner, a note arrived from Lord Alfred Courtland, offering Alice and Harry seats in his opera-box, which offer, after a few polite speeches to and from Mr. Crane, in his (in?) capacity as master of the house, was accepted. As they drove to the theatre, the following conversation passed between the husband and wife, the lady of course beginning it.
“What a detestable woman that Miss Crofton is! I’m sure I shall never be able to endure her. I see now where Kate’s faults came from. Miss Crofton has taught her to be worldly-minded, and ambitious, and all sorts of horrid things which she never used to be; and the creature is an old acquaintance of yours, too! Did you know her well—intimately?”
“Eh? yes! I saw a good deal of her at one time. How slow this fellow drives, we shall lose the overture!” was Harry’s reply, which, if he intended thereby to change the subject of the conversation, proved a dead failure, for Alice continued:—
“Oh! then you are not mere acquaintances, as she tried to make out! I thought she wasn’t speaking the truth. Well, and did you like her?—I dare say you did, for I feel sure she was in love with you; indeed I think she is still, by the way she casts down those great rolling eyes of hers whenever you say a word to her. I declare I feel quite jealous.”
Coverdale paused for a moment, ere he replied: “My dear Alice, you speak thoughtlessly, but you do not know how such remarks annoy me—faults I have, and more serious, ones than until lately I was at all aware of; but to suppose that since I first saw you, I have ever devoted one minute’s thought to any other woman breathing, would be to do me a foul injustice.” Alice perceived, from his manner of speaking, that her vague suspicions had really pained him, and having no other ground for them but an instinct which she confessed to herself to be utterly unsanctioned by reason, she determined to confess her sin and obtain absolution. This is in many cases a tedious and difficult operation, but when individuals are on those easy and agreeable terms which sometimes last so long as a year after marriage, the process becomes greatly facilitated. Thus, by a little graceful and appropriate pantomime, Alice caused it to be understood that she felt deeply penitent, and in a state of mental self-accusation only to be allayed by a remedy consisting (as some light-minded jester has phrased it), like a sermon, of “two heads and an application.” When this specific for female grief had been duly administered by Harry, peace was for the time restored, and the evening passed away most harmoniously in every sense of the word.