CHAP. XXVIII.
In the evening, when every breeze was calm, and "the bright-haired sun was making a golden set;" the Marquis Santa Cruz sat alone with his daughter, in her dressing room. Their conference had been long and salutary to both their hearts, and even as it closed with a communication to convince Marcella she entirely occupied that of Louis de Montemar; Lorenzo entered to summon the Marquis below.
Mr. Athelstone feared to agitate her, by an abrupt enunciation of the arrival of his nephew, but the appearance of Lorenzo, who had been the companion of his perilous voyage, was enough; and in speechless gratitude, she pressed her father's hand to her lips as he rose to obey the call.
The Marchioness and Mrs. Coningsby, and all of the family, excepting Cornelia and Marcella, were in the drawing-room with the Marquis. The Duke still lay on the litter on which he had been brought on shore; and he was looking around, with a melancholy smile, on the rapturous greetings with which every body met his friend. They were the sacred transports of dear, domestic kindred, where all was pure, and full of innoxious pleasure.
"I never had a family!" said he to himself, "and yet I have seen, and felt transports! and may their memory perish!" cried he, in the same inward voice, "for nothing but selfish passions were there."
Mrs. Coningsby approached the Duke, and welcomed him with her accustomed hospitable grace. Every one had now something of the same import to say to him; all but Alice, and she still continued to view from a distance this formidable Wharton, whom she had so often designated under the alarming appellatives of hideous, wicked, and detestable. Cornelia had, as frequently as herself, given him these abhorring epithets; and that Cornelia should now be as much infatuated with him, as had ever been their cousin Louis, Alice could not consider as the least enormity of his art.
The Marquis was at that time observing on the happy circumstance of the yacht standing for the mainland instead of the island. "In the latter case, old Peter tells me, you must have been lost upon the southern reef!"
"And it might have been our fate," rejoined Louis, "if Wharton's resolution had not mastered mine. On an obvious argument, I wanted to avoid the mainland, dreading the exposed condition in which he must have gone on shore."
"Yes," returned the Duke, "that boy was always wiser in his own conceit, than seven men that could give a reason! and so I even laid him under hatches, till we hailed Queen Bebba's flambeau!"
"How wicked is that gaiety!" whispered Alice to Ferdinand, "when we have all been so miserable!"