Protracted by various culinary devices, the late dinner had encroached on the night, just as the final cigar in the smoking-room had done on the early hours of morning; and after a long conversation, full of many stirring and tender reminiscences and many mutual confidences, Jerry Vane had driven away to his rooms, and Trevor Chute was left alone to ponder over them all again, and consider the task—if task it really was—that lay before him on the following morn.
And now to tell the reader more precisely the relation in which some of the dramatis personæ stand to each other.
Four years before the time when our story opens, Trevor Chute, then in the Foot Guards, had been engaged to Clare Collingwood. She was in her second season, though not yet in the zenith of her beauty, which was undeniably great, even in London; and his friend, Jervoise Vane, was at the same time the accepted of her second sister Ida, who had just 'come out' under the best auspices; yet the loves of all were fated to end unhappily.
Monetary misfortune overtook the family of Trevor Chute; expected settlements ended in smoke, and he had to begin what he called 'the sliding scale,' by exchanging from the Guards into a Line regiment then serving in India; and then the father of Clare—Sir Carnaby Collingwood—issued the stern fiat which broke off their engagement for ever.
'Of course,' thought he, as he looked dreamily upward to the concentric rings and wreaths of smoke, the produce of his mild havannah, 'we shall meet as mere friends, old acquaintances, and that sort of thing. Doubtless she has forgotten me, and all that I was to her once. Here, amid the gaieties of three successive seasons since those days, she must have found many greater attractions than poor Trevor Chute—this fellow Desmond among them—while the poor devil in the Line was broiling up country, with no solace save the memory—if solace it was—of the days that were no more!'
Sir Carnaby Collingwood was by nature proud, cold, and selfish. He had married for money, as his father had done before him; and though he seemed to have a pleasure in revenging himself, as some one has phrased it, by quenching the love and sunshine in the life of others, because of the lack of both in his own, Trevor Chute felt that he could scarcely with justice be upbraided for breaking off the marriage of a girl having such expectations as Clare with an almost penniless subaltern officer.
Ida's engagement terminated as related in the preceding chapter. With a cruelty that was somewhat deliberate, she fairly jilted Vane and married Jack Beverley, undeniably a handsomer and more showy man, whose settlements were unexceptionable, and came quite up to all that Sir Carnaby could wish.
Yet Beverley did not gain much by the transaction. Ida fell into a chronic state of health so delicate that decline was threatened; the family physicians interposed, and nearly three years passed away without her being able to join her husband in India, where he was then serving with Trevor Chute's regiment, and where he met his death by a terrible accident.
Jerry Vane felt deeply and bitterly the loss of the girl he had loved so well; and he would rather that she had gone to India and passed out of his circle, as he was constantly fated to hear of her, and not unfrequently to meet her; for Jerry's heart did not break, and sooth to say, between balls and dinners, croquet and Badminton parties, cricket matches, whist and chess tournaments, rinking, and so forth, his time was pretty well parcelled out, when in town or anywhere else.
Trevor Chute and Beverley had been warm friends when with the regiment. Loving Clare still, and treasuring all the tender past, he felt that her brother-in-law was a species of link between them, through whom he could always hear of her welfare, while he half hoped that she might wish to hear of his, and yet be led to take an interest in him.