“What amends can Cecil Baskelett make? My uncle is a man of honour: it is in his power. There, I leave you to speak to him; you will do it to-night, after we break up in the drawing-room.”
Rosamund groaned: “An apology to Dr. Shrapnel from Mr. Romfrey! It is an impossibility, Nevil! utter!”
“So you say to sit idle: but do as I tell you.”
He went downstairs.
He had barely reproached her. She wondered at that; and then remembered his alien sad half-smile in quitting the room.
Rosamund would not present herself at her lord’s dinner-table when there were any guests at Steynham. She prepared to receive Miss Halkett in the drawing-room, as the guests of the house this evening chanced to be her friends.
Madame de Rouaillout’s present to her was a photograph of M. de Croisnel, his daughter and son in a group. Rosamund could not bear to look at the face of Renée, and she put it out of sight. But she had looked. She was reduced to look again.
Roland stood beside his father’s chair; Renée sat at his feet, clasping his right hand. M. de Croisnel’s fallen eyelids and unshorn white chin told the story of the family reunion. He was dying: his two children were nursing him to the end.
Decidedly Cecilia was a more beautiful woman than Renée: but on which does the eye linger longest—which draws the heart? a radiant landscape, where the tall ripe wheat flashes between shadow and shine in the stately march of Summer, or the peep into dewy woodland on to dark water?
Dark-eyed Renée was not beauty but attraction; she touched the double chords within us which are we know not whether harmony or discord, but a divine discord if an uncertified harmony, memorable beyond plain sweetness or majesty. There are touches of bliss in anguish that superhumanize bliss, touches of mystery in simplicity, of the eternal in the variable. These two chords of poignant antiphony she struck throughout the range of the hearts of men, and strangely intervolved them in vibrating unison. Only to look at her face, without hearing her voice, without the charm of her speech, was to feel it. On Cecilia’s entering the drawing-room sofa, while the gentlemen drank claret, Rosamund handed her the card of the photographic artist of Tours, mentioning no names.