He again made as if to go, and again returned.
“It is extremely probable, nevertheless,” he said, “that we may see the dear emigrants back in Paris before long.”
With that he went off, taking the painter with him. Ned watched the couple receding, till the crowd absorbed them; then sat himself down, feeling benumbed and demoralised, upon a chair.
So, here was the end—the mocking means adopted to the rejection of his suit. It was a vile, cruel jest, he thought; a characteristic indulgence of selfishness inhuman, for which presently he would take fierce delight in calling a certain statesman to account. A statesman! his stricken vanity yelled to itself: a diplomatic buffoon who would sacrifice principle to a pun. So he classified Mr Sheridan, to whom he would attribute this ruin of his hopes.
But deeper emotions prevailed. Had the duke been, or was he at this last, despite his protestations, a party to the fraud? It mattered nothing at all. There was a more intimate question to put to his heart—the sadder and more sombre inquiry, Was the girl herself a confederate? And here he fell all amazed and overwhelmed; plunged in a slough of the most sorrowful speculation; struggling for foothold—for some memory at which he might clutch for the righting of his moral balance. There should have been many memories—of kind looks and words and touches, all instinct with the tender humour of truth. God in heaven! It was conceivable that the elder woman, the old practised strategist, had played a consummate rôle. It was never inconsistent with the principles of such pantological professors to indulge the hypocritical as part of their universal equipment. But Pamela, with not that of roguishness in her sweet eyes to justify a belief in anything but an innately honest soul behind them! Pamela, in the sincerity of her heart, in the womanliness of her nature, in the cleanness of her lips, craftily intriguing to indict Love’s passion of trust! He could not believe it. He could not but believe that some words, some acts of hers—most haunting in the retrospect—had been designed to express her sympathy with that in him which she could only as yet recognise in herself for a mood. And it had been, then, Madame de Genlis’ private policy to dismiss him before this mood—this bud—could timely open out into a flower.
Well, she had succeeded—thanks to one self-interested, with whom the reckoning was to come—she had succeeded, and aptly, no doubt, to the sequel. For it was not to be supposed that madame’s artifice would permit her to wean its subject from a fancy and fail to find the subject other food for a stimulated appetite. My lord the viscount had possibly, indeed, but (in the vernacular) kept the place warm for another. The sun of his passion may have only a little ripened the fruit for the delectation of lips more blest than his. By this time, it was probable, the dream that had been his was a transferred rapture.
What should he do—what should he do? He sat dully, his delicious sweet world of imagination shrunk to unsightly clinkers, very mean and grotesque. Only the real world stretched about him—a shoddy, vulgarly formal affair. A laugh, a mere ironic chest-note, came from him. For to what glorified uses did not men seek to convert this intrinsically tawdry material! They were always sensitive to the befooling holiday spirit, the spirit that is persistently ready to accept specious commonplace at a fancy value. For all the essential purposes of romantic passion he, if he chose, might take his pick (he with his title, his rich competence, and his personal attributes) from the human fair that tinkled and scintillated about him. Yet he must price all this opportunity at so much less worth than that of one set of features as to value it, lying ready to his hand, at a pinch of dust compared with the unattainable. The glamour of the fair was not for him, let him elect to give his philosophy licence without limit.
He did, it will be observed, madame la gouvernante (who had been genuinely distraught) something a little less than justice. But, after all, his resentment in the first instance was against Mr Sheridan, and in that, no doubt, he was justified; for he must fail, in the nature of things, to understand what reason but a personal one could have moved that gentleman to manœuvre to circumvent a suitor so frank and so admissible as himself.
He called for wine; and, while drinking, for the first time in his life, too much of it, his mood underwent a dozen rallies and relapses. Passion, exasperation, and the most sick desire to possess what now seemed to have evaded him for ever—emotion upon emotion, these wrought in his suffering mind. More than once he was half-stirred to the decision to return immediately to England; and, instantly recalling the duke’s enigmatical suggestion anent the ladies’ return to Paris, he would resolve to remain where he was, preferring the problematical to the chances of hunting counter in the mazes of his own capital. For he must see the girl again—to that he was determined; he must see her again and, crashing at last through the reserve his own diffidence had created, must seek to carry by storm that with which he had so mistakenly temporised.
And then suddenly—a vision called up, perhaps, by the unwonted fever in his veins—the figure of Pamela, as he had last seen it, stood holding out to him in its hands the little crushed scarlet blossoms; and he could see the wilful smile and hear the sweet voice offering him the rose of his desire; and all in a moment his eyes were full of tears, and he became shamefully conscious of his surroundings, the very character of which profaned his thought.