“Come up, my lady? Bless me!—let me just ‘range your hair—your ladyship is really in such dish-a-bill.”
“Best as it is, Shinfield—he will excuse all.—Go.”
Mrs. Shinfield shrugged her shoulders, and departed. A few moments more—a step on the stairs, the creaking of the door,—and Maltravers and Florence were again alone. He stood motionless on the threshold. She had involuntarily risen, and so they stood opposite to each other, and the lamp fell full upon her face. Oh, Heaven! when did that sight cease to haunt the heart of Maltravers! When shall that altered aspect not pass as a ghost before his eyes!—there it is, faithful and reproachful alike in solitude and in crowds—it is seen in the glare of noon—it passes dim and wan at night beneath the stars and the earth—it looked into his heart and left its likeness there for ever and for ever! Those cheeks, once so beautifully rounded, now sunken into lines and hollows—the livid darkness beneath the eyes—the whitened lip—the sharp, anxious, worn expression, which had replaced that glorious and beaming regard from which all the life of genius, all the sweet pride of womanhood had glowed forth, and in which not only the intelligence, but the eternity of the soul, seemed visibly wrought.
There he stood, aghast and appalled. At length a low groan broke from his lips—he rushed forward, sank on his knees beside her, and clasping both her hands, sobbed aloud as he covered them with kisses. All the iron of his strong nature was broken down, and his emotions, long silenced, and now uncontrollable and resistless, were something terrible to behold!
“Do not—do not weep so,” murmured Lady Florence, frightened by his vehemence; “I am sadly changed, but the fault is mine—Ernest, it is mine; best, kindest, gentlest, how could I have been so mad! And you forgive me? I am yours again—a little while yours. Ah, do not grieve while I am so blessed!”
As she spoke, her tears—tears from a source how different from that whence broke the scorching and intolerable agony of his own! fell soft upon his bended head, and the hands that still convulsively strained hers. Maltravers looked wildly up into her countenance, and shuddered as he saw her attempt to smile. He rose abruptly, threw himself into a chair, and covered his face. He was seeking by a violent effort to master himself, and it was only by the heaving of his chest, and now and then a gasp as for breath, that he betrayed the stormy struggle within.
Florence gazed at him a moment in bitter, in almost selfish penitence. “And this was the man who seemed to me so callous to the softer sympathies—this was the heart I trampled upon—this the nature I distrusted!”
She came near him, trembling and with feeble steps—she laid her hand upon his shoulder, and the fondness of love came over her, and she wound her arms around him.
“It is our fate—it is my fate,” said Maltravers at last, awaking as from a hideous dream, and in a hollow but calm voice—“we are the things of destiny, and the wheel has crushed us. It is an awful state of being this human life!—What is wisdom—virtue—faith to men—piety to Heaven—all the nurture we bestow on ourselves—all our desire to win a loftier sphere, when we are thus the tools of the merest chance—the victims of the pettiest villainy; and our very existence—our very senses almost, at the mercy of every traitor and every fool!”
There was something in Ernest’s voice, as well as in his reflections, which appeared so unnaturally calm and deep that it startled Florence, with a fear more acute than his previous violence had done. He rose, and muttering to himself, walked to and fro, as if insensible of her presence—in fact he was so. At length he stopped short, and fixing his eyes upon Lady Florence, said in a whispered and thrilling tone: