From saying quietly to her: “I thought once you loved him,” when alluding to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by degrees on to direct entreaties. She related the whole story of Renée in England, and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at Cecilia’s mildness after hearing it. Her hearer would have imagined that she had no moral sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the poor lady’s mind was distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp. Cecilia’s high conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of our English civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not explain it. She bowed to Lady Romfrey’s praises of Nevil, suffered her hands to be wrung, her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her love of him to be wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her cold resolution to marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In truth, it was too late to speak of Renée to her now. It did not beseem Cecilia to remember that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and while confessing to many errors, because she felt them, and gained a necessary strength from them—in the comfort of the consciousness of pain, for example, which she sorely needed, that the pain in her own breast might deaden her to Nevil’s jealousy, the meanest of the errors of a lofty soul, yielded no extract beyond the bare humiliation proper to an acknowledgement that it had existed: so she discarded the recollection of the passion which had wrought the mischief. Since we cannot have a peerless flower of civilization without artificial aid, it may be understood how it was that Cecilia could extinguish some lights in her mind and kindle others, and wherefore what it was not natural for her to do, she did. She had, briefly, a certain control of herself.
Our common readings in the fictitious romances which mark out a plot and measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful of the effect of that story of Renée. A wooden young woman, or a galvanized (sweet to the writer, either of them, as to the reader—so moveable they are!) would have seen her business at this point, and have glided melting to reconciliation and the chamber where romantic fiction ends joyously. Rosamund had counted on it.
She looked intently at Cecilia. “He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he has lost you—I am the cause!” she cried in a convulsion of grief.
“Dear Lady Romfrey!” Cecilia would have consoled her. “There is nothing to lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not to blame for anything: how can you be?”
“I spoke falsely of Dr. Shrapnel; I am the cause. It lies on me! it pursues me. Let me give to the poor as I may, and feel for the poor, as I do, to get nearer to Nevil—I cannot have peace! His heart has turned from me. He despises me. If I had spoken to Lord Romfrey at Steynham, as he commanded me, you and he—Oh! cowardice: he is right, cowardice is the chief evil in the world. He is ill; he is desperately ill; he will die.”
“Have you heard he is very ill, Lady Romfrey?”
“No! no!” Rosamund exclaimed; “it is by not hearing that I know it!”
With the assistance of Louise Devereux, Cecilia gradually awakened to what was going on in the house. There had been a correspondence between Miss Denham and the countess. Letters from Bevisham had suddenly ceased. Presumably the earl had stopped them: and if so it must have been for a tragic reason.
Cecilia hinted some blame of Lord Romfrey to her father.
He pressed her hand and said: “You don’t know what that man suffers. Romfrey is fond of Nevil too, but he must guard his wife; and the fact is Nevil is down with fever. It’s in the papers now; he may be able to conceal it, and I hope he will. There’ll be a crisis, and then he can tell her good news—a little illness and all right now! Of course,” the colonel continued buoyantly, “Nevil will recover; he’s a tough wiry young fellow, but poor Romfrey’s fears are natural enough about the countess. Her mind seems to be haunted by the doctor there—Shrapnel, I mean; and she’s exciteable to a degree that threatens the worst—in case of any accident in Bevisham.”