Not receiving this notice, Ormond had unfortunately gone upon the day that was specially prohibited.
Now that the kneeling figure appeared to him as a rival in despair, not in triumph, Ormond asked himself how he could ever have been such an idiot as to doubt Florence Annaly.
“Why did I set off in such haste for Paris?—Could not I have waited a day?—Could not I have written again?—Could I not have cross-questioned the drunken servant when he was sober?—Could not I have done any thing, in short, but what I did?”
Clearly as a man, when his anger is dissipated, sees what he ought to have done or to have left undone while the fury lasted; vividly as a man in a different kind of passion sees the folly of all he did, said, or thought, when he was possessed by the past madness; so clearly, so vividly, did Ormond now see and feel—and vehemently execrate, his jealous folly and mad precipitation; and then he came to the question, could his folly be repaired?—would his madness ever be forgiven? Ormond, in love affairs, never had any presumption—any tinge of the Connal coxcombry in his nature: he was not apt to flatter himself that he had made a deep impression; and now he was, perhaps from his sense of the superior value of the object, more than usually diffident. Though Miss Annaly was still unmarried, she might have resolved irrevocably against him. Though she was not a girl to act in the high-flown heroine style, and, in a fit of pride or revenge, to punish the man she liked, by marrying his rival, whom she did not like; yet Florence Annaly, as Ormond well knew, inherited some of her mother’s strength of character; and, in circumstances that deeply touched her heart, might be capable of all her mother’s warmth of indignation. It was in her character decidedly to refuse to connect herself with any man, however her heart might incline towards him, if he had any essential defect of temper; or if she thought that his attachment to her was not steady and strong, such as she deserved it should be, and such as her sensibility and all her hopes of domestic happiness required in a husband. And then there was Lady Annaly to be considered—how indignant she would be at his conduct!
While Ormond was travelling alone, he had full leisure to torment himself with these thoughts. Pressed forward alternately by hope and fear, each urging expedition, he hastened on—reached Dublin—crossed the water—and travelling day and night, lost not a moment till he was at the feet of his fair mistress.
To those who like to know the how, the when, and the where, it should be told that it was evening when he arrived. Florence Annaly was walking with her mother by the seaside, in one of the most beautiful and retired parts of the coasts of Devonshire, when they were told by a servant that a gentleman from Ireland had just arrived at their house, and wished to see them. A minute afterwards they saw—“Could it be?” Lady Annaly said, turning in doubt to her daughter; but the cheek of Florence instantly convinced the mother that it could be none but Mr. Ormond himself.
“Mr. Ormond!” said Lady Annaly, advancing kindly, yet with dignified reserve—“Mr. Ormond, after his long absence, is welcome to his old friend.”
There was in Ormond’s look and manner, as he approached, something that much inclined the daughter to hope that he might prove not utterly unworthy of her mother’s forgiveness; and when he spoke to the daughter, there was in his voice and look something that softened the mother’s heart, and irresistibly inclined her to wish that he might be able to give a satisfactory explanation of his strange conduct. Where the parties are thus happily disposed both to hear reason, to excuse passion, and to pardon the errors to which passion, even in the most reasonable minds, is liable, explanations are seldom tedious, or difficult to be comprehended. The moment Ormond produced the cover, the soiled cover of the letters, a glimpse of the truth struck Florence Annaly; and before he had got farther in his sentence than these words, “I did not receive your ladyship’s letter till within these few days,” all the reserve of Lady Annaly’s manner was dispelled: her smiles relieved his apprehensions, and encouraged him to proceed in his story with happy fluency. The carelessness of the drunken servant, who had occasioned so much mischief, was talked of for a few minutes with great satisfaction.
Ormond took his own share of the blame so frankly and with so good a grace, and described with such truth the agony he had been thrown into by the sight of the kneeling figure in regimentals, that Lady Annaly could not help comforting him by the assurance that Florence had, at the same moment, been sufficiently alarmed by the rearing of his horse at the sight of the flapping window-blind.
“The kneeling gentleman,” said Lady Annaly, “whom you thought at the height of joy and glory, was at that moment in the depths of despair. So ill do the passions see what is even before their eyes!”