“Shall I?” she asked, grasping his hand. “Oh, my friend, let it be as I desire. My whole life shall be devoted to making you happy,—you and her.” Then he was allowed to escape.
Lady Wanless, before she went to bed, was closeted for awhile with the eldest daughter. As Sophia was now almost as good as a married woman, she was received into closer counsel than the others. “Burmeston will do,” she said; “but, as for that Cavalry man, he means it no more than the chair.” The pity was that Burmeston might have been secured without the archery meeting, and that all the money, spent on behalf of the Major, should have been thrown away.
CHAPTER VII.
AFTER THE PARTY.
When the Major left Brook Park on the morning after the archery amusements he was quite sure of this,—that under no circumstances whatever would he be induced to ask Miss Georgiana Wanless to be his wife. He had promised to write a letter,—and he would write one instantly. He did not conceive it possible but that Lady Wanless should understand what would be the purport of that letter, although as she left him on the previous night she had pretended to hope otherwise. That her hopes had not been very high we know from the words which she spoke to Sophia in the privacy of her own room.
He had intended to return by Slowbridge, but when the morning came he changed his mind and went to Beetham. His reason for doing so was hardly plain, even to himself. He tried to make himself believe that the letter had better be written from Beetham,—hot, as it were, from the immediate neighbourhood,—than from London; but, as he thought of this, his mind was crowded with ideas of Alice Dugdale. He would not propose to Alice. At this moment, indeed, he was averse to matrimony, having been altogether disgusted with female society at Brook Park; but he had to acknowledge a sterling worth about Alice, and the existence of a genuine friendship between her and himself, which made it painful to him to leave the country without other recognition than that raising of his hat when he saw her at the corner of the lane. He had behaved badly in this Brook Park affair,—in having been tempted thither in opposition to those better instincts which had made Alice so pleasant a companion to him,—and was ashamed of himself. He did not think that he could go back to his former ideas. He was aware that Alice must think ill of him,—would not believe him to be now such as she had once thought him. England and London were distasteful to him. He would go abroad on that foreign service which he had proposed to himself. There was an opening for him to do so if he liked, and he could return to his present duties after a year or two. But he would see Alice again before he went. Thinking of all this, he drove himself back to Beetham.
On that morning tidings of the successful festivities at Brook Park reached the doctor’s house. Tidings of the coming festivities, then of the preparations, and at last of the festal day itself, had reached Alice, so that it seemed to her that all Beetham talked of nothing else. Old Lady Deepbell had caught a cold, walking about on the lawn with hardly anything on her old shoulders,—stupid old woman,—and had sent for the doctor the first thing in the morning. “Positively settled,” she had said to the doctor, “absolutely arranged, Dr. Dugdale. Lady Wanless told me so herself, and I congratulated the gentleman.” She did not go on to say that the gentleman had denied the accusation,—but then she had not believed the denial. The doctor, coming home, had thought it his duty to tell Alice, and Alice had received the news with a smile. “I knew it would be so, father.”
“And you?” This he said, holding her hand and looking tenderly into her eyes.
“Me! It will not hurt me. Not that I mean to tell a lie to you, father,” she added after a moment. “A woman isn’t hurt because she doesn’t get a prize in the lottery. Had it ever come about, I dare say I should have liked him well enough.”
“No more than that?”
“And why should it have come about?” she went on saying, avoiding her father’s last question, determined not to lie if she could help it, but determined, also, to show no wound. “I think my position in life very happy, but it isn’t one from which he would choose a wife.”