But it was not always that Roland Lansdell was thus bitter against the woman he loved. Sometimes in the midst of his rage and anger a sudden current of tenderness swept across the dark waters of his soul, and for a little while the image of Isabel Gilbert appeared to him in its true colours. He saw her as she really was: foolish, but not base; weak, but not hypocritical; sentimental, and with some blemish of womanly vanity perhaps, but not designing. Sometimes amidst all contending emotions, in which passion, and selfishness, and wounded pride, and mortified vanity, made a very whirlpool of bitter feeling,—sometimes amidst such baser emotions as these, true love—the sublime, the clear-sighted—arose for a brief interval triumphant, and Roland Lansdell thought tenderly of the woman who had shattered his future.
"My poor little girl,—my poor innocent childish love," he thought, in these moments of purer feeling; "if I could only be noble, and go away, and forgive you, and leave you to grow into a good woman, with that well-meaning commonplace husband, whom it is your duty to honour and obey."
Nothing could be more irregular than Mr. Lansdell's habits during this period. The cook at Mordred declared that such a thing as a soufflé was a simple impossibility with an employer who might require his dinner served at any time between the hours of seven and nine. The fish was flabby, the joints were leathery; and all the hot-water reservoirs in the Mordred dinner-service could not preserve the cook's most special plats from stagnation. That worthy artist shrugged his shoulders over the ruins of his work, and turned his attention to the composition of a menu in which the best things were to be eaten cold. He might have spared himself the trouble. The young man, who, naturally careless as to what he ate, had, out of pure affectation, been wont to outrival the insolence of the oldest bon-vivants, now scarcely knew the nature of the dishes that were set before him. He ate and drank mechanically; and it may be drank a little deeper than he had been accustomed to drink of the famous clarets his father and grandfather had collected. But eating delighted him not, nor drinking neither. The wine had no exhilarating effect upon him; he sat dull and gloomy after a magnum of the famous claret—sat with the Arabic grammar open before him, wondering what was to become of him, now that his life was done.
He was sitting thus in the library, with the sombre Rembrandt face that was something like his own looking gravely down upon him; he was sitting thus by the lamplit table one sultry June evening, when George Gilbert had been ill nearly a fortnight. The light of the lamp—a soft subdued light, shining dimly through a great moon-like orb of thick ground-glass—fell chiefly on the open book, and left the student's face in shadow. But even in that shadow the face looked wan and haggard, and the something that lurked somewhere in all the Lansdell portraits—the something that you may see in every picture of Charles the First of England and Marie Antoinette of France, whensoever and by whomsoever painted—was very visible in Roland's face to-night. He had been sitting brooding over his books, but scarcely reading half-a-dozen pages, ever since nine o'clock, and it was now half-past eleven. He was stretching his hand towards the bell in order to summon his valet, and release that personage from the task of sitting up any longer, yawning alone in the housekeeper's room,—for the habits of Mordred Priory had never lost the sobriety of Lady Anna Lansdell's régime, and all the servants except Roland's valet went to bed at eleven,—when that gentleman entered the library.
"Would you please to see any one, sir?" he asked.
"Would I please to see any one?" cried Roland, turning in his low easy-chair, and staring at the solemn face of his valet; "who should want to see me at such a time of night? Is there anything wrong? Is it any one from—from Lowlands?"
"No, sir, it's a strange lady; leastways, when I say a strange lady, I think, sir,—though, her veil being down, and a very thick veil, I should not like to speak positive,—I think it's Mrs. Gilbert, the doctor's lady, from Graybridge."
Mr. Lansdell's valet coughed doubtfully behind his hand, and looked discreetly at the carved oaken bosses in the ceiling. Roland started to his feet.
"Mrs. Gilbert," he muttered, "at such an hour as this! It can't be; she would never—Show the lady here, whoever she is," he added aloud to his servant. "There must be something wrong; it must be some very important business that brings any one to this place to-night."
The valet departed, closing the door behind him, and Roland stood alone upon the hearth, waiting for his late visitor. All the warmer tints—he never had what people call "a colour"—faded out of his face, and left him very pale. Why had she come to him at such a time? What purpose could she have in coming to that house, save one? She had come to revoke her decision. For a moment a flood of rapture swept into his soul, warm and revivifying as the glory of a sudden sunburst on a dull grey autumn day; but in the next moment,—so strange and subtle an emotion is that which we call love,—a chill sense of regret crept into his mind, and he was almost sorry that Isabel should come to him thus, even though she were to bring him the promise of future happiness.