She listened without betraying either terror, or anger, or disdain; but she raised her beautiful eyes to his with a sad, searching inquiry, before which many men would have quailed. “Have you counted the cost to yourself and to me?”
“I have done both,” replied Keene, gravely. “I can not say that you will never repent it; but I know that I shall never regret it.”
There were no promises or vows exchanged; but a silence for two long minutes; and, when these were passed, the sweet, pure lips had lost their virginity.
So with few more words it was finally arranged; and the next day Royston left Dorade to make preparations all along the road of their intended flight. Their plan was to take boat at Marseilles for the East, making their first permanent resting-place one of the islands of the Grecian Archipelago. Both were most anxious to evade any possibility of interception, more especially of collision with Dick Tresilyan.
On that evening Cecil was alone in her own room (Mrs. Danvers had gone out to a sort of love-feast at the Fullartons’, where the company were to be entertained with weak tea and strong doctrine à discretion). She had rejected the offer of Fanny’s companionship on the plea, not altogether false, of a tormenting headache. La mignonne was too innocent to suspect the reason that made her friend shudder in their parting embrace, half averting her cheek, though Cecil’s arms clung round her as though they would never let her go. The saddest feeling of the many that were busy then in the guilty, troubled heart, was a consciousness that in a few hours the gulf between them would be deep and impassable as the chasm dividing Abraham from Dives.
Miss Tresilyan had taken unconsciously an attitude in which you saw her once before, half-reclined, and gazing into the fire; outwardly still remained the same pensive, languid grace; but very different was the careless reverie that had stolen over her then, from the wild chaos of conflicting thoughts that involved her now.
Her whole being was so bound up in Royston Keene’s, that she felt without him there would be nothing worth living for; neither had she the faintest misgiving as to the chances of his inconstancy. There had descended to her some of the stability and determination of purpose which had made many of her race so powerful for good or evil; in the pursuit of either they would never admit a doubt, or listen to a compromise. When Cecil believed, she believed implicitly, and, not even with her own conscience, made conditions of surrender. So long as his strong arm was round her, she felt that she could defy shame, and even remorse; but how would it be if that support should fail? He had not been away yet twenty hours, and already there came creeping over her a chilling sense of helplessness and desolation. She knew her lover’s violent passions and haughty temper, impatient of the most distant approach to insolence or even contradiction from others, too well not to be aware that such a man walked ever on the frontier-ground between life and death. Suppose that he were taken from her?—her spirit, dauntless as it was, quailed before the ghastly terrors of imagined loneliness. An evil voice that had whispered perhaps in the ear of more than one of the “bitter, bad Tresilyans,” seemed to murmur, “You, too, can die:” but Cecil was not yet so lost as to listen to the suggestion of the subtle fiend. She wasted no regrets on the past, and the wreck of all its brilliant promises: she was resolute to meet the perils of the future; nevertheless, her heart was heavy with apprehension. Remember the answer that the stout Catholic made to Des Adrets, when the savage baron taunted him with cowardice for shrinking twice from the death-leap on the tower, “Je vous le donne, en dix.” So it is not in womanhood—however ruined in principle or reckless of the consequences, to venture deliberately, without a shudder, on the fatal plunge from which no fair fame has ever risen unshattered again. Even prejudices may not be torn up by the roots without stirring the earth around them.
She might have sat musing thus for about an hour; so deep in thought that she never heard 57 the portière slowly drawn aside that divided the room from an ante-chamber. The Tresilyan had her emotions under tolerable control, and at least was not given to screaming; but she could hardly repress the startled cry that sprang to her lips when she raised her eyes.
The reproachful spectre that had haunted her for years—till very lately, when a stronger influence chased it away—assumed substance of form and feature, as the dark doorway framed the haggard, pain-stricken face of Mark Waring.
