Many a picture—many a soft Gainsborough or softer Greuze—may suggest a face as delicate and beautiful as that which was turned up to his; but no picture ever painted by human hand had such a power of expression as that possessed by the face of Ida Beverley, as she sat there, slightly flushed by the heat of the crowded room, and feeling with pleasure the breeze from the great square without blowing on her cheek, and laden with perfumes of fresh flowers as it passed through the long conservatory.
The broken ring, the gipsy ring of the dream, rent in two by the cruel tiger's fangs, was now on the marriage finger beside the wedding hoop, as Jerry could see when she drew off her glove, but he was glad to observe that her mourning was becoming lessened by trimmings of grey silk; yet the dark costume, by its contrast to the pallor and purity of her complexion, made Ida seem lovelier than ever, and his heart ached to think that those trappings of woe were worn for a rival.
Why did he seek her presence? he was asking himself again. Did some lingering hope inspire him? Without it Jerry felt that it would be madness to place himself within the sphere of her beauty, with their mutual past; yet he could not deny himself the joy of the present, in watching the tenderness of her soft grey-blue eye, the glory of her auburn hair, and the grace of all her actions.
She had been the wife of Beverley, true; but the wife of only a few months, and left behind in loneliness while yet a bride.
Worried by her sadness, and sick of her repining, selfish old Sir Carnaby had become, unknown to her, somewhat an adherent of her first lover. He was not disinclined to let his widowed daughter become the wife of this unappropriated man, whose good looks and style were as undeniable as his position and expectations. Thus he whispered to Evelyn Desmond that he was not ill-pleased to see them draw apart within the conservatory door.
Jerry's friends would have called him 'a muff,' to sigh as he did, and make himself 'a blighted being' for Ida, whose whole heart and soul seemed devoted to another, and who sorrowed as some women only sorrow over their dead, going through the world with one visionary yet formed fancy that floated drearily and vaguely in her memory. Yet, in spite of himself, Jerry Vane hovered near the sad one like a love-bird by the nest of its young.
It was impossible that the love of this faithful, honest, and good-hearted fellow should fail to impress Ida. She was conscious that his fate was a cruel one, and of her own making; and she felt a great pity for him; for although she had been fickle once, her nature was generous and compassionate.
A dead flirtation can seldom be revived, but an old love is often rekindled; yet Ida bore him none as yet; it was only pity, as we have said—compunction for what she had done—a tenderness, nothing more, save, perhaps, a sense of honour for him, that gave Jerry Vane an indefinable and, it may be, dangerous attraction to her; and now, as he spoke to her, bending over her as he used to do of old, her dark blue eyes changed and shadowed with the changing thoughts that passed quickly through her mind.
'We are good friends as ever,' said she, smiling upward in reply to some remark of his.
'Ida, some one has written that after love, mere friendship becomes more cruel than hate, and says it is the worst cruelty "when we seek love—as a stone proffered to us when we ask for bread in famine."'