CHAPTER XXVIII.
ENGAGED.
On this occasion, at least, the society papers did not lie! Lord Cecil Neville and Lady Grace Peyton were engaged! If some marriages are made in Heaven, certainly some other matches are made by the gossip-mongers, and this was one of them.
If any one had told Cecil Neville that in a few short months he would, though having lost Doris, have proposed to Lady Grace, he would have laughed the prophet to scorn; and yet propose to her he did.
From that eventful morning when he had received, as he thought, irrefutable proof of Doris’ faithlessness and treachery, and been rescued from imprisonment by Lady Grace, a great change had fallen upon Cecil Neville. Life had lost its savor, and the days that used to pass so swiftly, with pleasure at the helm and youth at the prow, hung like lead upon his hands. Time, which most of us find all too short, dragged terribly with him. Do what he would, he could not drown the memory of the beautiful girl whom he had loved so passionately, and whose image seemed engraven upon his heart. Morning, noon, and night her presence seemed to haunt him. He went about as usual for a day or two, but the old amusements; the clubs, where he was always so warmly greeted; the dances, which never seemed complete successes without “Cissy” Neville; the river parties, and four-in-hand excursions, in which he was always the leading spirit, all seemed tame and spiritless, and though he laughed as usual, and tried to hide the wound which he had received, his friends noticed that he seemed preoccupied and gloomy; and when he found that they observed it, and that he was sitting silent in the midst of the carnival of pleasure, like the ghost-haunted man in the ballad, he suddenly took his fishing-rod and went off to Norway.
He had met Lady Grace frequently since the morning she had come to his rescue, but they had only exchanged a few words at meeting and parting, as he felt that he could not talk as if nothing had happened, and he would not talk of what had happened, and on the night before his sudden departure he had only said a few concise words of farewell.
“Going to Norway?” she said, in a constrained voice. “Yes?—well, I think that is the best thing you can do; it is all very stupid here in London!” and she had given him her hand, and let her magnificent eyes rest on his for a second or two with a look that would have impressed him and set him thinking, if he had ever given thought to any other subject but the faithless girl who had jilted him.
If any one had told him that Lady Grace had gone home a few minutes after parting from him, and shut herself up for a couple of days, reappearing, looking pale and weary, it would never have occurred to him that her sudden disappearance had been on his account.
He went to Norway, and though he thought of her now and again with a gratitude which made him miserable—for he could not see how on earth he was going to repay her the money she had so generously paid for him—he was too much occupied with recalling Doris to think much of this other beautiful woman. He ought to have been happy in Norway, for the fishing was good, and he was lucky, but the big salmon did not bring him the satisfaction they used to do; and he was sitting one evening in the room of the rather rough inn at which he was staying, wondering what he should do with himself next, and whether it wouldn’t be better to go and bury himself in South Africa, or volunteer for the next of our little wars, when he heard his name mentioned. There was a party of young men staying at the inn, and they occupied the room next to his and divided from it by the thinnest of partitions, through which their constant chatter and laughter filtered day and night to worry him.
When he heard his name, he woke up from a reverie in which he was wondering whether Doris was happy, and whether she ever thought of him and those days in the Barton meadows; and, remembering that listeners seldom hear any good of themselves, he took up his pipe, and was walking out to smoke in the open air, when it seemed to him that he heard Lady Grace’s name also.