“What troubles?” said Hugh, sternly.
“Why, I told you the other day,” said Arthur, regardful of Frederica’s presence. “She looks twice as bright as she did in Italy.”
“Now it seems to me,” said Mrs Crichton, “that you are all making a very unnecessary talk about her. Miss Venning has decidedly stretched a point in having her here. I don’t altogether approve of it. Young ladies shouldn’t have histories, and they should keep her and hers in the background.”
“Aunt Lily, I think that would be mean,” said Frederica.
“Aunt Lily’s never seen her,” said Arthur.
“No, my dear, I don’t feel any curiosity about her,” said Mrs Crichton, didactically.
Jem—no other word will express it—giggled; Hugh sprang to his feet, and, happily for the preservation of his secret, knocked over the lamp beside him, and in the confusion that followed Violante was forgotten, and he contrived to apologise and make his escape.
Such discussions rendered him furious, far more so than any amount of opposition could have done while he had had the one purpose of marrying Violante clear and straight before him. Then he would have borne patiently with his mother’s natural opposition, and would have smiled at anyone else’s. But now that they should all dare to praise her, and judge her, and “take an interest” in her! It made him very angry, and yet he was ashamed of his own connection with it. He would not have had it discovered for the world; and then, when he knew this feeling to be despicable, it was justified by the knowledge of the pain and disturbance any discovery would cause, and increased by his jealousy of Violante’s reported confidences and conversations. Arthur had been eager about nothing else. Hugh had an unbounded belief in Violante’s irresistible charms, and none in the depth and permanency of Arthur’s sorrow, even while that sorrow made his own. He was never in the same mind for five minutes at a time, angry, miserable, jealous, and self-reproachful. He was sacrificing himself, of course, in giving up all his chances of winning her, and yet he could not quite rid himself of the suspicion that he was false and cruel, and that he had been his best self when he defied the world for her sake. If accident had thrown her in his way the whole current of events might have been changed; but he could not and would not seek her, though he thought about her enough to make chance allusions far more his dread than they ever were Arthur’s, who never thought of them till they came; and he bemoaned himself over the Dysart dinner-party, the announcement of which his cousin hardly heeded.
“Hugh has become exceedingly cross,” Freddie said to Jem, with the freedom of speech of the Redhurst household.
“Then, don’t make him more so,” was Jem’s advice, given with equal openness.