It appeared very plain to him that the Grey Abbey family must have discarded him—that Fanny Wyndham, Lord and Lady Cashel, and the whole set, must have made up their minds to drop him altogether; otherwise, one of the family would not have openly declared the match at an end. And yet he was at a loss to conceive how they could have done so—how even Lord Cashel could have reconciled it to himself to do so, without the common-place courtesy of writing to him on the subject. And then, when he thought of her, “his own Fanny,” as he had so often called her, he was still more bewildered: she, with whom he had sat for so many sweet hours talking of the impossibility of their ever forgetting, deserting, or even slighting each other; she, who had been so entirely devoted to him—so much more than engaged to him—could she have lent her name to such a heartless mode of breaking her faith?
“If I had merely proposed for her through her guardian,” thought Frank, to himself—“if I had got Lord Cashel to make the engagement, as many men do, I should not be surprised; but after all that has passed between us—after all her vows, and all her—” and then Lord Ballindine struck his horse with his heel, and made a cut at the air with his whip, as he remembered certain passages more binding even than promises, warmer even than vows, which seemed to make him as miserable now as they had made him happy at the time of their occurrence. “I would not believe it,” he continued, meditating, “if twenty Kilcullens said it, or if fifty Mat Tierneys swore to it!” and then he rode on towards the lodge, in a state of mind for which I am quite unable to account, if his disbelief in Fanny Wyndham’s constancy was really as strong as he had declared it to be. And, as he rode, many unusual thoughts—for, hitherto, Frank had not been a very deep-thinking man—crowded his mind, as to the baseness, falsehood, and iniquity of the human race, especially of rich cautious old peers who had beautiful wards in their power.
By the time he had reached the lodge, he had determined that he must now do something, and that, as he was quite unable to come to any satisfactory conclusion on his own unassisted judgment, he must consult Blake, who, by the bye, was nearly as sick of Fanny Wyndham as he would have been had he himself been the person engaged to marry her.
As he rode round to the yard, he saw his friend standing at the door of one of the stables, with a cigar in his mouth.
“Well, Frank, how does Brien go to-day? Not that he’ll ever be the thing till he gets to the other side of the water. They’ll never be able to bring a horse out as he should be, on the Curragh, till they’ve regular trained gallops. The slightest frost in spring, or sun in summer, and the ground’s so hard, you might as well gallop your horse down the pavement of Grafton Street.”
“Confound the horse,” answered Frank; “come here, Dot, a minute. I want to speak to you.”
“What the d––––l’s the matter?—he’s not lame, is he?”
“Who?—what?—Brien Boru? Not that I know of. I wish the brute had never been foaled.”
“And why so? What crotchet have you got in your head now? Something wrong about Fanny, I suppose?”
“Why, did you hear anything?”