“Shall I carry it for you, my dear?” said a vulgar-looking and over-dressed young fellow, who had put his glass in his eye to stare at her.
She muttered but one word, but that it was enough seemed clear, as his companion said, “I declare I think you deserved it!”
“It has begun already,” said she to herself, as she walked slowly along towards the town. “The bitter conflict with the world, of which I have only heard hitherto, I now must face. By this time he knows it; he knows that he is desolate, and that he shall never see me more. All the misery is not, therefore, mine; nor is mine the greater. I have youth, and can hope; he cannot hope; he can but grieve on to the last. Well, let him go to that world he loves so dearly, and ask it to console him. It will say by its thousand tongues, ‘You have done well, Sir Within. Why should you have allied yourself with a low-born peasant-girl? How could her beauty have reconciled you to her want of refinement, her ignorance, her coarse breeding?’ Ah, what an answer could his heart give, if he but dared to utter it; for he could tell them I was their equal in all their vaunted captivations! Will he have the courage to do this? Or, will he seek comfort in the falsehood that belies me?”
In thoughts like these, ever revolving around herself and her altered fortunes, she journeyed on, and by the third day arrived at Holyhead. The rendezvous was given at a small inn outside the town called “The Kid,” and directions for her reception had been already forwarded there. Two days elapsed before her uncle’s messenger arrived—two days that seemed to extend to as many years! How did her ever-active mind go over in that space all her past life, from the cruel sorrows of her early days, to the pampered existence she had led at Dalradern? She fancied what she might have been, if she had never left her lowly station, but grown up amongst the hardships and privations of her humble condition. She canvassed in her mind the way in which she might have either conformed to that life, or struggled against it. “I cannot believe,” said she, with a saucy laugh, as she stood and looked at herself in the glass, “that these arms were meant to carry sea-wrack, or that these feet were fashioned to clamber shoeless up the rocks! And yet, if destiny had fixed me there, how should I have escaped? I cannot tell, any more than I can tell what is yet before me! And what a fascination there is in this uncertainty! What a wondrous influence has the unknown! How eventful does the slightest action become, when it may lead to that which can determine a life’s fortune! Even now, how much is in my power! I might go back, throw myself at that old man’s feet, and tell him that it was in vain I tried it—I could not leave him. I might kneel there till he raised me, and when he did so, I should be his wife, a titled lady, and mistress of that grand old castle! Could I do this? No: no more than I could go and beg the Vyners to have pity on me and take me back; that my heart clung to the happiness I had learned to feel amongst them; and that I would rather serve them as a menial than live away from them. Better to die than this. And, what will this life at Arran be? This uncle, too, I dread him; and yet, I long to see him. I want to hear him call me by his own name, and acknowledge me as a Luttrell. Oh, if he had but done this before—before I had travelled this weary road of deception and falsehood! Who knows? Who knows?”
“Are you the young lady, Miss, that’s expecting an elderly gentleman?” said the housemaid, entering hastily.
“Where from? How did he come?” cried Elate, eagerly; for her first thought was, it might be Sir Within.
“He came by the Irish packet, Miss.”
“Yes that is quite right. If he asks for Miss Luttrell, you may say I am ready to see him.”
In a minute or two after she had given this order, the girl again opened the door, saying:
“Mr. Coles, Miss;” and introduced a florid, fussy-looking little man, with a manner compounded of courtesy and command.