“I should place them the other side of the town,” said Miss Venning, with decision, “out towards Blackwood.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, still staring out of the window and hearing nothing.
It may seem a somewhat contemptible state of mind to record; but Hugh was overpowered by a sense of embarrassment, of utter uncertainty as to what to do, as to how to greet her. Why should he evade the previous acquaintance acknowledged by James and Arthur? And yet he felt there was but one way in which he could speak to her. As he half turned, and hesitated as he talked confusedly to Miss Venning, the class of girls filed out of the room. Violante passed him. All the short-lived fire of her nature was roused by his hesitation. She gave him no glance of appealing timidity or hopeless love. She flung up her head and looked at him with an indignation such as he had never dreamt of seeing in her soft eyes, and, in answer to his confused bow, she made the slightest of curtseys and walked out of the room.
“You have met Mr Crichton?” said Clarissa, who had been with the class.
“Yes, Miss Clarissa, at my father’s classes, but I have no acquaintance with him. It was Mr Spencer who met us at Caletto. Come, Katie—come, Agnes. Your exercises have too many faults. I shall scold.” And she sat down and took up her pen, and felt for the moment as if she could defy every turn of fortune. Clarissa looked at her, and went back to where Hugh, confused and wretched, was talking at random, having heard Violante’s parting shot. She had turned the tables on him; she was no vision, no holiday dream, as he had sometimes called her; but a living woman, first misjudged and then neglected. He might be right and self-denying, might be giving up his greatest good for the sake of others; but she was wronged, and she had made him feel it.
“I have given it all up!—all—to make some slight atonement for the wrong I have done,” he thought; “and I must seem a sneak and a scoundrel to myself. How little they know! What a lie life is! If I were a boy I’d run away to sea and have done with it. And I must go this eternal round of committees and business—and—gas-works—” with passionate impatience at the momentary matter in hand, as he hurried away, having wildly pledged himself to vote for the locating of the gas-works in the midst of Lord Lidford’s park at Blackwood.
He was stung to the very quick by Violante’s anger, yet he had made up his mind that all should be at an end between them, and he had too much self-respect to try “to make the worse appear the better reason,” and to offer her any explanation, since he withheld the one that was her due. Perhaps, the very renewal of regret that the sight of her face—more womanly and more beautiful than when he had left her—caused him was a sort of support, as it strengthened the sense of self-sacrifice. But he was sufficiently upset and perturbed by what had passed to forget one or two important pieces of business, and was forced to accept Arthur’s help in hastily repairing his neglect, though he had begun the day by resolving that he would not let much work fall on his cousin when the soft spring weather made him look so pale and languid.
With Violante anger was a short-lived passion, and an hour had not passed before she longed to recall her scornful words and look, before she was making a hundred excuses for her lover. The sight of Hugh in his own place affected her as it, doubtless, had, however unconsciously, affected him. She felt miles farther away from him here in his own town than among the flowers of Italy. The pleasant novelty around her was beginning to lose its effect; she began to grow scared and stupid, to be again the little helpless Violante of Civita Bella.
One afternoon—it was a half-holiday—Miss Florence came sweeping into the school-room, penetrating it like a fresh sunny wind, darting into its corners, touching the sports, employments, humours of all its inhabitants, criticising a drawing, suggesting a book, adjusting a little quarrel; fresh currents of air seemed to follow her bright flaxen head as she whisked about till she beheld Violante standing by herself in the window and looking very disconsolate.
“Why, signorina, what’s the matter?”