Leaning on his stick, his cold sneer upon his thin lip, Lord Lilburne limped, step by step, with the pair, though a little apart from them, glancing from moment to moment at the face of Philip Beaufort, where he had hoped to read a grief that he could not detect. Lord Lilburne had carefully refrained from an interview with Philip till that day, and he now only came to the wedding as a surgeon goes to an hospital, to examine a disease he had been told would be great and sore: he was disappointed. Close behind followed Sidney, radiant with joy, and bloom, and beauty; and his kind guardian, the tears rolling down his eyes, murmured blessings as he looked upon him. Mrs. Beaufort had declined attending the ceremony—her nerves were too weak—but, behind, at a longer interval, came Robert Beaufort, sober, staid, collected as ever to outward seeming; but a close observer might have seen that his eye had lost its habitual complacent cunning, that his step was more heavy, his stoop more joyless. About his air there was a some thing crestfallen. The consciousness of acres had passed away from his portly presence. He was no longer a possessor, but a pensioner. The rich man, who had decided as he pleased on the happiness of others, was a cipher; he had ceased to have any interest in anything. What to him the marriage of his daughter now? Her children would not be the heirs of Beaufort. As Camilla kindly turned round, and through happy tears waited for his approach, to clasp his hand, he forced a smile, but it was sickly and piteous. He longed to creep away, and be alone.
“My father!” said Camilla, in her sweet low voice; and she extricated herself from Philip, and threw herself on his breast.
“She is a good child,” said Robert Beaufort vacantly, and, turning his dry eyes to the group, he caught instinctively at his customary commonplaces;—“and a good child, Mr. Sidney, makes a good wife!”
The clergyman bowed as if the compliment were addressed to himself: he was the only man there whom Robert Beaufort could now deceive.
“My sister,” said Philip Beaufort, as once more leaning on his arm, they paused before the church door, “may Sidney love and prize you as—as I would have done; and believe me, both of you, I have no regret, no memory, that wounds me now.”
He dropped the hand, and motioned to her father to load her to the carriage. Then winding his arm into Sidney’s, he said,—
“Wait till they are gone: I have one word yet with you. Go on, gentlemen.”
The clergyman bowed, and walked through the churchyard. But Lilburne, pausing and surveying Philip Beaufort, said to him, whisperingly,—
“And so much for feeling—the folly! So much for generosity—the delusion! Happy man!”
“I am thoroughly happy, Lord Lilburne.”