“Oh! but I know him so well,” said Cecilia, conjuring up that innocent enthusiasm of hers for Mr. Austin as an antidote to her sharp suffering. The next minute she looked on her father as the key of an enigma concerning Seymour Austin, whom, she imagined, possibly she had not hitherto known at all. Her curiosity to pierce it faded. She and her maid were packing through the night. At dawn she requested her maid to lift the window-blind and give her an opinion of the weather. “Grey, Miss,” the maid reported. It signified to Cecilia: no one roaming outside.
The step she was taking was a desperate attempt at a cure; and she commenced it, though sorely wounded, with pity for Nevil’s disappointment, and a singularly clear-eyed perception of his aims and motives.—“I am rich, and he wants riches; he likes me, and he reads my weakness.”—Jealousy shook her by fits, but she had no right to be jealous, nor any right to reproach him. Her task was to climb back to those heavenly heights she sat on before he distracted her and drew her down.
Beauchamp came to a vacated house that day.
CHAPTER XLVI.
AS IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN FORESEEN
It was in Italy that Cecilia’s maiden dreams of life had opened. She hoped to recover them in Italy, and the calm security of a mind untainted. Italy was to be her reviving air.
While this idea of a specific for her malady endured travelling at speed to the ridges of the Italian frontier, across France—she simply remembered Nevil: he was distant; he had no place in the storied landscape, among the images of Art and the names of patient great men who bear, as they bestow, an atmosphere other than earth’s for those adoring them. If at night, in her sleep, he was a memory that conducted her through scenes which were lightnings, the cool swift morning of her flight released her. France, too, her rival!—the land of France, personified by her instinctively, though she had no vivid imaginative gift, did not wound her with a poisoned dart.—“She knew him first: she was his first love.” The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below them, renewed Cecilia’s lofty-perching youth. Then—I am in Italy! she sighed with rapture. The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.
But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful to the soul. In Rome Cecilia’s vision of her track to Rome was of a run of fire over a heath. She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome. It seemed burnt out.
Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment she had flown from: jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it like nothing she had yet experienced. Previous pains were but Summer lightnings, passing shadows. She could have believed in sorcery: the man had eaten her heart!
A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the notion of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird. It served to veil her dulness. An ultra-English family in Rome, composed, shocking to relate, of a baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced girls, and a young gentleman of our country, once perhaps a light-limbed boy, chose to be followed by their footman in the melancholy pomp of state livery. Wherever she encountered them Cecilia talked Nevil Beauchamp. Even Mr. Tuckham perceived it. She was extremely uncharitable: she extended her ungenerous criticism to the institution of the footman: England, and the English, were lashed.
“These people are caricatures,” Tuckham said, in apology for poor England burlesqued abroad. “You must not generalize on them. Footmen are footmen all the world over. The cardinals have a fine set of footmen.”