“I’ve been idle too long.”
“But, Captain Beauchamp,” said Jenny, “you proposed to do nothing but read for a couple of years.”
“Ay, there’s the voyage!” sighed he, with a sailor-invalid’s vision of sunny seas dancing in the far sky.
“You must persuade Dr. Shrapnel to come; and he will not come unless you come too, and you won’t go anywhere but to the Alps!” She bent her eyes on the floor. Beauchamp remembered what had brought her home from the Alps. He cast a cold look on his uncle talking with Cecilia: granite, as he thought. And the reflux of that slight feeling of despair seemed to tear down with it in wreckage every effort he had made in life, and cry failure on him. Yet he was hoping that he had not been created for failure.
He touched his uncle’s hand indifferently: “My love to the countess: let me hear of her, sir, if you please.”
“You shall,” said the earl. “But, off to Madeira, and up Teneriffe: sail the Azores. I’ll hire you a good-sized schooner.”
“There is the Esperanza,” said Cecilia. “And the vessel is lying idle, Nevil! Can you allow it?”
He consented to laugh at himself, and fell to coughing.
Jenny Denham saw a real human expression of anxiety cross the features of the earl at the sound of the cough.
Lord Romfrey said “Adieu,” to her.