'No,' said Mary. 'I know they are like brother and sister, and Clara could never have written to me as she has done, had there been any such notion. But that is not the point, papa. What I know is, that while my feelings are what they are at present, it would not be right of me to accept any one; and so I shall tell Mr. Ward, if he is still determined to see me. Pray forgive me, dear papa. I do admire and honour him very much, but I cannot do any more; and I am sorry I have seemed pining or discontented, for I tried not to be so.'
A grim grunt was all the answer that Mr. Ponsonby vouchsafed. His conscience, though not his lips, acquitted poor Mary of discontent or pining, as indeed it was the uniform cheerfulness of her demeanour that had misled him into thinking the unfortunate affair forgotten.
He showed no symptoms of speaking again; and Mary, leaning back in her chair, had leisure to recover herself after the many severe strokes that had been made at her. There was one which she had rebutted valiantly at the moment, but which proved to have been a poisoned dart—that suggestion that it might be selfish in her not to set Louis even more free, by her own marriage!
She revolved the probabilities: Clara, formed, guided, supported by himself, the companion of his earlier youth, preferred to all others, and by this time, no doubt, developed into all that was admirable. What would be more probable than their mutual love? And when Mary went over all the circumstances of her own strange courtship, she could not but recur to her mother's original impression, that Louis had not known what he was doing. Those last weeks had made her feel rather than believe otherwise, but they were far in the distance now, and he had been so young! It was not unlikely that even yet, while believing himself faithful to her, his heart was in Clara's keeping, and that the news of her marriage would reveal to them both, in one rush of happiness, that they were destined for each other from the first.
Mary felt intense pain, and yet a strange thrill of joy, to think that Louis might at last be happy.
She drew Clara's last letter out of her basket, and re-read it, in hopes of some contradiction. Clara's letters had all hitherto been stiff. She had not been acknowledged to be in the secret of Mary's engagement while it subsisted, and this occasioned a delicacy in writing to her on any subject connected with it; and so the mention of the meeting at the 'Grand Monarque' came in tamely, and went off quickly into Lord Ormersfield's rheumatism and Charlemagne's tomb. But the remarkable thing in the letter was the unusual perfume of happiness that pervaded it; the conventional itinerary was abandoned, and there was a tendency to droll sayings—nay, some shafts from a quiver at which Mary could guess. She had set all down as the exhilaration of Louis's presence, but perhaps that exhilaration, was to a degree in which she alone could sympathize.
Mary was no day-dreamer; and yet, ere Rosita's satin shoe was on the threshold, she had indulged in the melancholy fabric of a castle at Ormersfield, in which she had no share, except the consciousness that it had been her self-sacrifice that had given Louis at last the felicity for which he was so well fitted.
But at night, in her strange little room, lying in her hammock, and looking up through her one unglazed window, high up in the roof, to the stars that slowly travelled across the space, she came back to a more collected opinion. She had no right to sacrifice Mr. Ward as well as herself. Louis could not be more free than she had made him already, and it would be doing evil that good might come, to accept the addresses of one man while she could not detach her heart from another. 'Have I ever really tried yet? she thought. 'Perhaps I am punishing him and poor Mr. Ward, because, as papa says, I have languished, and have never tried in earnest to wean my thoughts from him. He was the one precious memory, besides my dear mother, and she never thought it would come to good. He will turn out to have been constant to Clara all the time, though he did not know it.'
Even if Mr. Ponsonby had been in full health, he would have had no inclination to spare Mary the conversation with Mr. Ward, who took his hot nine miles' ride from Lima in the early morning, before the shadow of the mountains had been drawn up from the arid barren slope leading to Chorillos.
He came in time for the late breakfast, when the table was loaded with various beautiful tropical fruits, tempting after his ride, and in his state of suspense. He talked of his journey, and of his intended absence, and his regret, in a manner half mechanical, half dreamy, which made Mary quite sorry for him; it was melancholy for a man of his age to have fixed so many fond hopes where disappointment was in store for him. She wished to deal as kindly with him as she could, and did not shrink away when her father left them, muttering something about a letter, and Rosita went to take her siesta.