“You know, I haven’t been there for ages,” he explained.
“I hear it!” she sighed, aware of the credit his escort would bring her in Beckley, and especially with Harry’s grandmama Bonner.
They went together to the village church. The Countess took care to be late, so that all eyes beheld her stately march up the aisle, with her captive beside her.
Nor was her captive less happy than he professed he would be. Charming comic side-play, at the expense of Mr. Parsley, she mingled with exceeding devoutness, and a serious attention to Mr. Parsley’s discourse. In her heart this lady really thought her confessed daily sins forgiven her by the recovery of the lost sheep to Mr. Parsley’s fold. The results of this small passage of arms were, that Evan’s disclosure at Fallowfield was annulled in the mind of Harry Jocelyn, and the latter gentleman became the happy slave of the Countess de Saldar.
CHAPTER XVI.
LEADS TO A SMALL SKIRMISH BETWEEN ROSE AND EVAN
Lady Jocelyn belonged properly to that order which the Sultans and the Roxalanas of earth combine to exclude from their little games, under the designation of blues, or strong-minded women: a kind, if genuine, the least dangerous and staunchest of the sex, as poor fellows learn when the flippant and the frail fair have made mummies of them. She had the frankness of her daughter, the same direct eyes and firm step: a face without shadows, though no longer bright with youth. It may be charged to her as one of the errors of her strong mind, that she believed friendship practicable between men and women, young or old. She knew the world pretty well, and was not amazed by extraordinary accidents; but as she herself continued to be an example of her faith: we must presume it natural that her delusion should cling to her. She welcomed Evan as her daughter’s friend, walked half-way across the room to meet him on his introduction to her, and with the simple words, “I have heard of you,” let him see that he stood upon his merits in her house. The young man’s spirit caught something of hers even in their first interview, and at once mounted to that level. Unconsciously he felt that she took, and would take him, for what he was, and he rose to his worth in the society she presided over. A youth like Evan could not perceive, that in loving this lady’s daughter, and accepting the place she offered him, he was guilty of a breach of confidence; or reflect, that her entire absence of suspicion imposed upon him a corresponding honesty toward her. He fell into a blindness. Without dreaming for a moment that she designed to encourage his passion for Rose, he yet beheld himself in the light she had cast on him; and, received as her daughter’s friend, it seemed to him not so utterly monstrous that he might be her daughter’s lover. A haughty, a grand, or a too familiar manner, would have kept his eyes clearer on his true condition. Lady Jocelyn spoke to his secret nature, and eclipsed in his mind the outward aspects with which it was warring. To her he was a gallant young man, a fit companion for Rose, and when she and Sir Franks said, and showed him, that they were glad to know him, his heart swam in a flood of happiness they little suspected.
This was another of the many forms of intoxication to which circumstances subjected the poor lover. In Fallowfield, among impertinent young men, Evan’s pride proclaimed him a tailor. At Beckley Court, acted on by one genuine soul, he forgot it, and felt elate in his manhood. The shades of Tailordom dispersed like fog before the full South-west breeze. When I say he forgot it, the fact was present enough to him, but it became an outward fact: he had ceased to feel it within him. It was not a portion of his being, hard as Mrs. Mel had struck to fix it. Consequently, though he was in a far worse plight than when he parted with Rose on board the Jocasta, he felt much less of an impostor now. This may have been partly because he had endured his struggle with the Demogorgon the Countess painted to him in such frightful colours, and found him human after all; but it was mainly owing to the hearty welcome Lady Jocelyn had extended to him as the friend of Rose.
Loving Rose, he nevertheless allowed his love no tender liberties. The eyes of a lover are not his own; but his hands and lips are, till such time as they are claimed. The sun must smile on us with peculiar warmth to woo us forth utterly—pluck our hearts out. Rose smiled on many. She smiled on Drummond Forth, Ferdinand Laxley, William Harvey, and her brother Harry; and she had the same eyes for all ages. Once, previous to the arrival of the latter three, there was a change in her look, or Evan fancied it. They were going to ride out together, and Evan, coming to his horse on the gravel walk, saw her talking with Drummond Forth. He mounted, awaiting her, and either from a slight twinge of jealousy, or to mark her dainty tread with her riding-habit drawn above her heels, he could not help turning his head occasionally. She listened to Drummond with attention, but presently broke from him, crying: “It’s an absurdity. Speak to them yourself—I shall not.”
On the ride that day, she began prattling of this and that with the careless glee that became her well, and then sank into a reverie. Between-whiles her eyes had raised tumults in Evan’s breast by dropping on him in a sort of questioning way, as if she wished him to speak, or wished to fathom something she would rather have unspoken. Ere they had finished their ride, she tossed off what burden may have been on her mind as lightly as a stray lock from her shoulders. He thought that the singular look recurred. It charmed him too much for him to speculate on it.
The Countess’s opportune ally, the gout, which had reduced the Hon. Melville Jocelyn’s right hand to a state of uselessness, served her with her brother equally: for, having volunteered his services to the invalided diplomatist, it excused his stay at Beckley Court to himself, and was a mask to his intimacy with Rose, besides earning him the thanks of the family. Harry Jocelyn, released from the wing of the Countess, came straight to him, and in a rough kind of way begged Evan to overlook his rudeness.