“You little behind-the-world fossil! Blue! Cultured is the proper expression. And how am I disappointed? Una, I’m more in love with my real true natural self than with any one else at present. And I should like to go to college—I read an article about it the other day. I should like a little room to fit up, and to have tea with my friends, and debates, and discussions, and new ideas. Then I needn’t think about being married for the next five years. But there, that packing is finished. I’ll go for a walk, the country is delightful after London.”
She went away as she spoke, and Una heard her run down the long staircase, light of foot, and seemingly light of heart.
“I shall never be able to ‘let myself go,’ as long as I live,” thought she, with a weary sigh. “And I see no stars anywhere. Only—sometimes—that great Light—and then darkness.”
Amethyst walked through the deserted garden, rejoicing in her freedom, for she was free of regrets for Lucian, as well as of pledges to Sir Richard Grattan. She could laugh a little cynically at the girlish dream in which Lucian had seemed an ideal of perfection; she could give thanks, with bated breath, that she had not tied herself to Sir Richard; she could not but be thankful to Sylvester for having saved her; but she looked back upon her interview with him with a sense of shame, as she remembered that he, her lover, had pleaded with her not to debase her womanhood by marrying a man whom she did not love, and had had to plead, long and earnestly, before he won the day. She hoped that the love he had declared had been but the love of a poet’s dream; it seemed so, since he had never followed it up, for she could never wish to see him again, though she hoped never to fall again below his standard of noble maidenhood. His voice seemed to ring in her ears: “I would rather see you die than do it.”
She wondered what Mr Carisbrooke thought of the end of all her prospects. Had he really been Blanche’s first lover, as Una declared Charles to have said? Perhaps there was another side to that old story, and Blanche had broken his heart, not he Blanche’s.
But she had nothing now to do with any of them. Her life was her own, to begin afresh. But what lay before her? The life of intellectual interests and youthful striving was altogether out of her reach. All that was likely was a bad imitation of her London success. She knew well enough the sort of “old friends” among whom her parents’ rank, and her own reputation as a beauty, would still make her a desired guest. She had had glimpses of such society in the last two years.
“I am only twenty,” she thought. “I am strong and I am clever, and I think that I have proved that I am brave, and I should like to be good. Yet it seems that there is no life worth living, open to me. What am I to do? There’s plenty of spring in me. Free? I’m tied up with cobwebs. If any one could tell me what to do?”
As she looked round, as if in search of an answer, she saw Mr Riddell coming towards her, along the very path by which he had come on that day when his few words of advice had seemed to offer her a little help in her early helplessness; when his kindness had given her a little comfort, though all her world had then been unkind.
Amethyst believed in the existence of good people. That faith she perhaps owed to the capacity for goodness in herself. She knew that Mr Riddell would never tell her anything that he did not himself believe to be helpful and true. He asked after her family with kindly courtesy.
“We shall see you and your sisters, I hope, at the Rectory,” he said. “My sister and I are alone, for my son has gone to Scotland.”