CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE WHEEL TURNS
“Thus artists melt the sullen ore of lead,
By heaping coals of fire upon its head.”
Goldsmith.
When the Countess of Dashleigh, with bitter words of reproach, had departed from the cottage of Bardon, she left her late entertainers in a state of mind little to be envied. The unfortunate Cecilia was for the rest of the day much in the position of one who, with hands tied, is caged up with a large hornet which has been irritated, and which goes about buzzing with evident determination to find or to make a foe. Everything went wrong with the doctor, and his daughter was the only being within reach of the hornet’s sting!
Bardon’s temper broke out especially at dinner, where every little luxury which had been prepared for Annabella served as a provocation to her irritated host. The unfortunate chicken (a delicacy till lately almost unknown at the little cottage), could not have been more denounced as tough, tasteless, and uneatable, if it had been a roasted owl. The tartlets (made surreptitiously by poor Cecilia in the absence of Mrs. Bates) roused such an angry storm against all the inventors, makers, and eaters of such abominable trash, that Cecilia silently resolved that they should never appear on the table again; she would rather throw them into the road! Miss Bardon’s gaily tinted bubble of grandeur had broken, and left behind nothing but bitterness and—bills!
The fact was that Dr. Bardon was angry with himself, though a great deal too proud to own it. He was haunted by the countenance of the unfortunate Dashleigh as he last had seen it in the car, and had a strong persuasion on his mind that the earl, in a fit of frenzy, would fling himself out of the balloon, and be dashed to pieces in the fall! The subject of the ascent of the Eaglet was one so painful to Bardon that he would endure no allusion to it; and Cecilia soon discovered that there was no method of raising a storm so certain, as that of uttering aloud the conjectures and apprehensions to which such an event naturally gave rise. Silence, particularly on so interesting a subject, was a cruel penance to the poor lady, to whom gossip was one of the few remaining pleasures of life, but to that penance she was obliged to submit as being the lesser of two evils.
The anxious vicar himself had not passed a more disturbed night with the images of his child and his brother breaking his rest, than did the proud old doctor. Conscience had at length made him miserable, although it had not made him meek. He was no longer stormy, but he was sullen; and he did not even choose to communicate to his daughter his intention of calling on the Aumerles as soon as his breakfast should be concluded, in order to inquire whether anything had been heard of the missing balloon.
The postman, who had just left at the vicarage “The Fairy Lake” for the Countess of Dashleigh, now called at the cottage with a letter. The doctor’s correspondents were so very few in number that such an event was sufficiently rare to excite attention; and Bardon’s mind was so pre-occupied with the idea of coming misfortune and death, that he turned pale on seeing that the epistle directed to him was sealed and deep-bordered with black.