So long after darkness had sunk over Lubeck, he sat at his window thinking, and smoking a favourite pipe given him by Beverley in India, and many times he filled and emptied it without seeing his way very clear in the future, while the clear northern moon flooded the sky with a light against which the taper church spires of the little city stood up in sharp and dark outlines, and the bells of the cathedral tolled the hours in succession, and the sunshine, or at least the grey dawn, began to steal over the woodlands that surround Lubeck; and with it came the odour of peat, as the fires were lighted—an odour as strong as there is in any Irish village, or a Scottish clachan in the wilds of Lorne or Lochabar; and he strove to court sleep, thinking that it would be better were he sleeping as Jack Beverley did, under the shadowy shelter of the Indian palms and the fragrance of the baubul trees.
CHAPTER XV.
'LOVE IS STRONG AS DEATH.'
Jerry Vane did not leave Carnaby Court at the time he intended to do; with ulterior views in her kind heart, Clare pressed him to lengthen his visit, and enjoy a few days' more shooting. She found but little pressing requisite to influence Jerry's actions; yet ere long he had cause greatly to deplore that he had not taken his departure earlier, and he was again doomed to experience a bitter shock concerning his rival—if rival, indeed, he had.
Daily and hourly intercourse afforded him all the facilities he could wish for now; but it seemed as though Ida would never again receive him or accept him as her lover, yet would permit him to be the slave of her fascinations, and without the slightest symptoms of vanity or coquetry. She knew all the simple and single-hearted fellow's love, and yet, apparently, would not yield him hers.
Indeed, she had more than once hinted or said, he scarcely knew which, as he declined to accept the proposition, that she wished his regard for her to die away in silence. If so, why did she permit her sister to urge that she should remain at Carnaby Court, where, in virtue of her widowhood, she yet presided as matron, though some change would assuredly take place on the return of Lady Evelyn to England.
Whatever were her motives, he could not but give himself up blindly and helplessly to the intoxication of the present time, to gaze upon her face, to hear her voice, and conjure up the hope that a time would come when she would love him better than ever. Besides, her society was full of many charms. As in Clare, there was in Ida a wonderful attraction to a companion. She had, though young, travelled much in Europe, and seen all that was worth seeing. She was thus familiar with many countries; and so far as their histories and traditions went, together with a knowledge of literature that was classic, refined, abstruse, and even mystic, as we have shown, she was far beyond an everyday young Englishman like Jerry Vane.
'I am neither a boy nor a madman, yet I dream like both in hanging on here as I do!' he would sometimes say in bitterness; and then he would recall her remarkable words on that evening in town—'It may be that we have only been in our hearts waiting for each other after all.'
From what did these hopeful words spring?—coquetry, mockery, reality, or what?
She was never known to coquet; she was too genuine a creature for mockery; hence, they must have been reality, and, full of this conviction, he resolved once more to put it to the issue on the first opportunity, and one was secured on the very afternoon he made the resolution.