He had ceased for some days to write to her. In this he accused himself of gross selfishness; but his father's open threats of withdrawing every shilling of his allowance, of turning his back upon him for ever, and so forth, if he dared to countenance the Devereaux in any way; and his total inability to live anywhere on his subaltern's pay alone, together with the dread of compromising his cold, proud, and intensely aristocratic mother and sister—in fact, it would seem, his whole family too—made him strive to crush in his heart the young love it was so sweet to brood upon; but Audley strove in vain, and began to think that the sooner he was back to India the better for all.
He had been nervous, irritable, and "out of sorts" since he had returned to Rhoscadzhel, and obtaining a passing glimpse of the little white villa as the train passed it, en route, had made him worse. He had procured Champagne and various other vintages too freely from Jasper Funnel; he had broken the knees of a favourite horse; ripped up the green cloth of the new billiard table when practising alone, and more than once had angrily laid his whip across the back of unoffending Rajah.
On the afternoon of the visit which closes the preceding chapter, his mother who was seated languidly in a deep easy chair near the library fire, playing with a feather fan, while her daintily slippered little feet rested on a velvet tabourette, said in her soft and monotonous voice,—
"I do wish, Audley, that odious dog of yours was dead—shot or lost."
"Why, mother, it was poor Jack Delamere's dying legacy."
"It is such a shaggy, self-willed, huge and savage animal—always about one's skirts or in one's way."
"You are unusually energetic in your adjectives this evening, my lady mother," replied Audley; "poor Rajah is as gentle as a lamb, and I might have found a kind owner for him ere this, however," he added, as he thought sadly of the winning Sybil on whose skirts his splendid pet had been permitted to nestle unrebuked.
"Visitors, mamma!" exclaimed Gartha Trevelyan, a fair-haired and languid edition of her mother, and already, in her sixteenth year, the imitator of all her tones and ways; "who can they be—in a hired carriage, too?"
"Ladies in deep mourning," said General Trecarrel, glancing uneasily at Audley.
"By Jove!" muttered the latter, growing quite pale, as he recognised them from a bay window, and at once quitting the library, descended by a private staircase to where his horse and groom happened to be awaiting him.