“Indeed! Have you known the Baron long?”
“We are only friends of a week. I have been living, ever since I was in Germany, a very retired life. A circumstance of a most painful nature drove me from England; a circumstance of which I can hardly flatter myself, and can hardly wish, that you should be ignorant.”
“I learnt the sad history from one who, while he spoke the truth, spoke of the living sufferer in terms of the fondest affection.”
“A father!” said Vivian, agitated, “a father can hardly be expected to be impartial.”
“Such a father as yours may, I only wish that he was with us now, to assist me in bringing about what he must greatly desire, your return to England.”
“It cannot be. I look back to the last year which I spent in that country with feelings of such disgust, I look forward to a return to that country with feelings of such repugnance that—but I feel I am trespassing beyond all bounds in touching on these subjects.”
“I promised your father that in case we met, I would seek your society. I have suffered too much myself not to understand how dangerous and how deceitful is the excess of grief. You have allowed yourself to be overcome by that which Providence intended as a lesson of instruction, not as a sentence of despair. In your solitude you have increased the shadow of those fantasies of a heated brain, which converse with the pure sunshine of the world would have enabled you to dispel.”
“The pure sunshine of the world, Lady Madeleine! would that it had ever lighted me! My youth flourished in the unwholesome sultriness of a blighted atmosphere, which I mistook for the resplendent brilliancy of a summer day. How deceived I was, you may judge, not certainly from finding me here; but I am here because I have ceased to suffer, only in having ceased to hope.”
“You have ceased to hope, because hope and consolation are not the companions of solitude, which are of a darker nature. Hope and consolation spring from the social affections. Converse with the world will do more for you than all the arguments of philosophers. I hope yet to find you a believer in the existence of that good which we all worship and all pursue. Happiness comes when we least expect it, and to those who strive least to obtain it; as you were fortunate yesterday at the Redoute, when you played without an idea of winning.”
They were in the Limewalk: gay sounds greeted them, and Miss Fane came forward from a light-hearted band to welcome her cousin. She had to propose a walk to the New Spring, which she was prepared for Lady Madeleine to resist on the ground of her cousin’s health. But Miss Fane combated all the objections with airy merriment, and with a bright resource that never flagged. As she bent her head slightly to Vivian, ere she hastened back to her companions to announce the success of her mission, it seemed to him that he had never beheld so animated and beaming a countenance, or glanced upon a form of such ineffable and sparkling grace.