CHAPTER XVII.
ENNUI AND WEARINESS.
But for her love for Bevil Goring, Alison felt at times that she would have sacrificed herself for her father. Selfish and coldly proud though his nature was, still he was her father, and she was his last link to earth—the last link of that long chain of ancestors he prized so much, and who went back to the years of the War of Independence, and beyond them.
Yes—out of pity for him she might have sacrificed herself to Cadbury; but now the image of Bevil Goring rendered that impossible, and even death itself preferable.
Poor girl! moped in that great dull hotel, she wearied sorely. Her father was kind to her after a fashion of his own, but she longed regretfully for the past time when she could throw her arms around her mother's neck and lay her head upon her breast—the panacea for all young folks whose troubles seem overwhelming; but what were the troubles that beset her when that dear mother was alive, compared with those that beset her now?
And with regard to these, she knew what that mother's advice would have been:—'Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.'
My Lord Cadbury was rather tiring, or getting exasperated by the slow success of his love affair, and was beginning to think seriously of how he would separate Alison from her 'bore of a father,' and get her alone with him, perhaps to Brussels, where his rascal Gaskins would easily procure him apartments.
For some time past his lordship had cunningly dropped the rôle of lover and adopted that of friend, perhaps to throw Alison off her guard, and as he did not—as some old fellows do—act 'the paternal' part, to a certain extent she became so, and her normal state or feeling of defiance and dislike was dulled for a time.
Thus her face looked calm and placid, with a curiously pathetic expression, and her eyes had at times a far-away look in them that gave Sir Ranald a strange dull pain in his heart, especially one evening, when, taking grapes one by one from a plate of painted Antwerp china-ware, she fed him playfully as a nurse might a child.
'Bird Ailie,' said he, 'my dear bird Ailie.'
He saw how her hand looked quite transparent, and a pang of dismay smote his heart.