He paused, and strove to cover with a halting smile his sudden perception that they were not talking with candor to each other. There were things in her mind, things in his mind, which bore no relation to the words they uttered. She was looking at him musingly—and he felt that he could read in her glance, or perhaps gather from what there was not in her glance, that she would not go if he begged her with sufficient earnestness to remain. Nay, the conviction flashed vividly uppermost in his thoughts that even a tolerable simulation of this earnestness would be enough. It was as if a game were being played, in which he was not quite the master of his moves. In this mere instant of time, while they had stood facing each other, he had been able to reproduce the whole panorama of his contact with this beautiful woman. From that first memorable day when she had come into his wondering, distraught vision of the new life before him, to that other day but a week ago when he had stood trembling with passionate emotions in her presence, his mental pictures of her rose connectedly about him. They exerted a pressure upon his will. They left him no free agency in the matter. By all the chivalric, tenderly compassionate memories they evoked, he must bid her to remain.
“I am very sorry that you feel you must go,” was what he heard himself say instead.
“Good-bye,” she answered simply, and gave him her gloved hand with an impassive face. “Lord Chobham and Lord Lingfield are good enough to see me back to London again. We are driving round through the forest. Our people are to join us at the station with the luggage. Goodbye.”
He accompanied the party out to the carriage door, despite some formal doubts about its being the proper thing to do. Both father and son made remarks to him, to which he seemed to himself to be making suitable answers, but what they were about he never knew. The tragedy of Edith’s final departure from Caermere—she who had been the hostess here when he came; she who was to have worn the coronet on her lovely brow as the mistress of it all—seized upon his mind and harrowed it. A vehement self-reproach that his thoughts should have done her even momentary injustice stung him, as he beheld her seated in the carriage. She smiled at him—that wistful, subdued smile of the headache—and then, as the horses moved, his eyes were resting upon another smile instead—the beaming of fatuous content upon the countenance of Lord Lingfield, who sat facing her.
Christian, regarding this second cousin of his as the carriage receded from view, suddenly breathed a long sigh of relief.
All at once remembering many things, he wheeled with the impulse to run up the steps. Upon reflection, he ascended them sedately instead, and gave orders in the hall that Mr. Westland should be sent to him forthwith. Two or more groups of departing guests came upon him, while he stood irresolutely here, and he bade them farewell with formal gravity. The two parsons whom he had seen at the church were among them—attired now in black garments with curiously ugly little round, flat hats—and he noted with interest that their smirking deference now displeased him less than it had done in the morning. He perceived that his lungs were becoming accustomed to the atmosphere of adulation, and smiled tolerantly at himself. How long would it be, he wondered with idle amusement, before it would stifle him to breathe any other air?
Augustine had sauntered out from some unknown quarter into the hall, and Christian beckoned to him. A shapeless kind of suspicion, born of a resemblance now for the first time suggesting itself, had risen in his brain. He took the young man by the arm, and strolled aside with him.
“Am I wrong,” he asked carelessly, “or did I see you at the supper at the Hanover Theater? Let us see—it would be a week ago to-night? I thought so. Why I asked—I was curious to know whom you were with. It was a young man; you were standing together between some scenery as I passed you.”
“Oh!” said Augustine, with visible reassurance. “That was Tom Bailey—Cora’s brother, you know.”
“What sort is he?” Christian pursued, secretly astonished at the inspired accuracy of his intuition.