Chapter Twenty Two.
The Flaming Sword.
Amethyst held many more conversations with Oliver Carisbrooke during the next few weeks, with the result that a distinct, though peculiar, relation was established between them. He was the only person she ever met—Sylvester of course having returned to Oxbridge—who had any intellectual interests, and Amethyst had so vigorous and inquiring a mind, that even fashion and frivolity could not stifle it. He gave her to understand that he was quite outside the ranks of her suitors, and only aspired to a rational friendship, and flattery of her intelligence was so much rarer, and less a matter of course, than flattery of her beauty, that it had a greater charm. He afforded an outlet to that side of her nature which could not be satisfied with the splendid outside of life.
The world was pressing hard on her soul. What had she come to London for, but to make a great marriage? Her family had made sacrifices for it, her acquaintances looked out for it, she herself intended it.
Every day made her engagement to Sir Richard Grattan more inevitable. She liked him very well, she knew that she could make the position that he offered to her splendid, she believed that she should be happy in it, and yet she was buying it at the cost of the divine spark within her which was her very self. She believed that romantic love was over for her, and that she was no longer the kind of person to whom religion could be an inspiring enthusiasm, though she did find in it a standard below which she did not mean to fall. She thought that she had outgrown a great deal in her short life.
Rather, she had hardly begun to grow, and within her were budding impulses, the nature of which she could not yet know. She had decided that the best thing she could do under the circumstances was to marry Sir Richard Grattan, and the habit she had formed, in self-defence, of keeping to the surface of life, prevented her from realising exactly what her resolution involved. In the meantime, Mr Carisbrooke lent her books and discussed them, and made her, she hardly knew how, feel that she was not cut off from the other side of life. He said daring things that stuck in her memory. He, at least, was not worldly-minded.
“Oh, the hero and heroine made a wise choice, I think,” he said, discussing a novel. “They had more—more life in one hour of each other, than in all the prosperity they sacrificed.”
“But they did wrong,” said Amethyst, who took things simply still.