“With a hundred thousand and that face one might make you a viscountess, and yet not do badly, either,” said he to himself; and then, as if satisfied that he had given time enough to a mere speculative thought, he turned over the visiting-cards to see the names of the current acquaintance: “Midchekoff, Estrolenka, Janini, Tiverton, Latrobe, the old set; the Ricketts, too, and Haggerstone. What can have brought them here? Oh, there must have been a ball, for here are shoals of outsiders, the great Smith-Brown-and-Thompson community; and here, on the very smallest of pasteboards, in the very meekest of literals, have we our dear friend 'Albert Jekyl.' He 'll tell me all I want to know,” said Norwood, as he threw himself back on the comfortable depth of a well-cushioned chair, and gave way to a pleasant revery.
When George Ouslow had informed Lady Hester of Norwood's arrival, he hastened to Sir Stafford's apartment to tell him how completely the Viscount had exonerated himself from any charge that might be made to his discredit; not, indeed, that George understood one syllable of the explanation, nor could trace anything like connection between the disjointed links of the narrative. He could only affirm his own perfect conviction in Norwood's honor, and hoped an equal degree of faith from his father. Fortunately for his powers of persuasiveness, they were not destined to be so sorely tried; for Sir Stafford had just walked out, and George, too eager to set all right about Norwood, took his hat and followed, in the hope of overtaking him.
Lady Hester was already dressed, and about to enter the drawing-room, when George told her that Norwood was there; and yet she returned to her room and made some changes in her toilet, slight, and perhaps too insignificant to record, but yet of importance enough to occupy some time, and afford her an interval for thoughts which, whatever their nature, served to flush her cheek and agitate her deeply.
It is an awkward thing, at any time, to meet with the person to whom you once believed you should have been married; to see, on the terms of mere common acquaintance, the individual with whose fate and fortune you at one time fancied your own was indissolubly bound up, for weal or woe, for better or for worse. To exchange the vapid commonplaces of the world; to barter the poor counters of that petty game called society, with her or him with whom you have walked in all the unbounded confidence of affection, speculating on a golden future, or glorying in a delicious dream of present bliss; to touch with ceremonious respect that hand you have so often held fast within your own; to behold with respectful distance that form beside which you have sat for hours, lost in happy fancies; to stand, as it were, and trace out with the eye some path in life we might have followed, wondering whither it would have led us, if to some higher pinnacle of gratified ambition, if to disappointments darker than those we have ever known, speculating on a future which is already become a past, and canvassing within our hearts the follies that have misled and the faults that have wrecked us! Such are among the inevitable reminiscences of meeting; and they are full of a soft and touching sorrow, not all unpleasing, either, as they remind us of our youth and its buoyancy. Far otherwise was the present case. Whatever might have been the bold confidence with which Lady Hester protested her belief in Norwood's honor, her own heartfelt knowledge of the man refuted the assertion. She knew thoroughly that he was perfectly devoid of all principle, and merely possessed that conventional degree of fair dealing indispensable to association with his equals. That he would do anything short of what would subject him to disgrace she had long seen; and perhaps the unhappy moment had come when even this restraint was no longer a barrier. And yet, with all this depreciating sense of the man, would it be believed she had once loved him! ay, with as sincere an affection as she was capable of feeling for anything.
'T is true, time and its consequences had effaced much of this feeling. His own indifference had done something, her new relations with the world had done more; and if she ever thought of him now, it was with a degree of half terror that there lived one man who had so thoroughly read all the secrets of her heart, and knew every sentiment of her nature.
Norwood was sitting in a chair as she entered, amusing himself with the gambols of a little Blenheim spaniel, whose silver collar bore the coronet of the Russian prince. He never perceived Lady Hester until she was close beside him, and in an easy, half-indifferent tone, said,
“How d' ye do, my Lord?”
“What, Hester!” said he, starting up, and taking her hand in both his own.
She withdrew it languidly, and seating herself, not upon the sofa to which he wished to lead her, but in a chair, asked when he had arrived, and by what route.
“I came out in a yacht; stopping a few days at Gibraltar, and a week at Malta.”