“Barbara!” says my aunt, “I desire you to forego in the future all intercourse with this—this person.”
Meantime Miss Prue and my papa, the Earl, were becoming perilously intimate. There was a stream of brimming wine-pledging wit that flowed between them, very entrancing and alluring, to a favourite toast, who sat outside the pale of it talking to her aunt.
What a pair they made, this old beau masquerading as a young one, and this nameless, tattered beggar masquerading as his mistress! And life or death was the stake for which he, poor lad, played. I could not bear to think of his position. It turned my bosom cold. But how consummate was his game! With what genius and spirit did he conduct it! And I think I never saw such courage, for it must have called for a higher fortitude than any of the battlefield. Looking on this pair in the wonder of my heart I was far too fired in the brave lad’s cause, not to mention the urgence of my own, to once forget the Captain fretting solitary in his bonds. Therefore I remembered that my hour for action was at hand.
After the meal, I waited till this trio were seated at the cards; then having lent Prue a sufficiency of money to enable her to play, I told my aunt that I proposed to go and cheer the Captain in his solitude.
The unhappy wretch was greatly as I had left him. He was perhaps a little gaunter from his fretfulness. But his knee was not easier, nor his heart more peaceable.
“Captain,” I announced myself as sweetly as could be, “I know you to be mortal dull in this extremity. Therefore if I can I am come to cheer you in it. And I have a deal of compassion for you.”
The Captain could not quite conceal his look of pleasure, and, reading it, I took the tone and speech I had used to be exceeding pat to the occasion.
“How good of you, my Lady Barbara,” says he, with a gratefulness I knew to be sincere, “to think of me in my affliction; nay, how good of you to think of me at all.”
At first I was confounded that a man so shrewd and piercing in his mind as Captain Grantley, should be so disarmed with my simple airs, and be so unsuspicious of a motive for them. But then a lover is very jealous of himself, and if the object of his adoration tells him to his face that she sometimes thinks about him, and proves the same by her presence at his side, he is so anxious to believe her that he the more readily persuades himself of her veracity. Besides, Beauty makes the wise man credulous. Sure it is hard to disbelieve her, else her amorous fibs and her sighing insincerities ne’er would have slain so many of the great figures of the histories. Even the Antonys must meet their Cleopatras.
“Ah, dear lady,” says the Captain, with a sparkle in his manly features that became them very well, “the prospect that your presence brings makes me almost happy in my accident. A bitter wintry night, a rosy fire, a bottle of wine, and a lively conversation with one whose beauty is the rival of her mind—surely this is the heart’s desire?”