And now equipages were finished, and wedding paraphernalia sent home—the second time that wedding-dresses had been furnished for Miss Stanley;—and never once were these looked at by the bride elect, nor even by Cecilia, but to see that all was as it should be—that seen, she sighed, and passed on.
Felicie’s ecstasies were no more to be heard: we forgot to mention that she had, before Helen’s return from Llansillen, departed, dismissed in disgrace; and happy was it for Lady Cecilia and Helen to be relieved from her jabbering, and not exposed to her spying and reporting. Nevertheless, the gloom that hung over the world above could not but be observed by the world below; it was, however, naturally accounted for by Lady Davenant’s state of health, and by the anxiety which Lady Cecilia must feel for the general, who, as it had been officially announced by Mr. Cockburn, was to set out on foreign service the day after the marriage.
Lady Cecilia, notwithstanding the bright hopefulness of her temper, and her habits of sanguine belief that all would end well in which she and her good fortune had any concern, seemed now, in this respect, to have changed her nature; and ever since her husband’s denunciations, had continued quite resigned to misery, and submissive to the fate which she thought she had deserved. She was much employed in attendance upon her mother, and thankful that she was so permitted to be. She never mentioned her husband’s name, and if she alluded to him, or to what had been decreed by him, it was with an emotion that scarcely dared to touch the point. She spoke most of her child, and seemed to look to the care of him as her only consolation. The boy had been brought from Kensington for Lady Davenant to see, and was now at her house. Cecilia once said she thought he was very like his father, and hoped that he would at least take leave of his boy at the last. To that last hour—that hour when she was to see her husband once more, when they were to meet but to part, to meet first at the wedding ceremony, and at a breakfast in a public company,—altogether painful as it must be, yet she looked forward to it with a sort of longing ardent impatience. “True, it will be dreadful, yet still—still I shall see him again, see him once again, and he cannot part with his once so dear Cecilia without some word—some look, different from his last.”
The evening before the day on which the wedding was to be, Lady Cecilia was in Lady Davenant’s room, sitting beside the bed while her mother slept. Suddenly she was startled from her still and ever the same recurring train of melancholy thoughts, by a sound which had often made her heart beat with joy—her husband’s knock; she ran to the window, opened it, and was out on the balcony in an instant. His horse was at the door, he had alighted, and was going up the steps; she leaned over the rails of the balcony, and as she leaned, a flower she wore broke off—it fell at the general’s feet: he looked up, and their eyes met. There he stood, waiting on those steps, some minutes, for an answer to his inquiry how Lady Davenant was: and when the answer was brought out by Elliott, whom, as it seemed, he had desired to see, he remounted his horse, and rode away without ever again looking up to the balcony.
Lady Davenant had awakened, and when Cecilia returned on hearing her voice, her mother, as the light from the half-open shutters shone upon her face, saw that she was in tears; she kneeled down by the side of the bed, and wept bitterly; she made her mother understand how it had been.
“Not that I hoped more, but still—still to feel it so! Oh! mother, I am bitterly punished.”
Then Lady Davenant seizing those clasped hands, and raising herself in her bed, fixed her eyes earnestly upon Cecilia, and asked,—“Would you, Cecilia—tell me, would you if it were now, this moment, in your power—would you retract your confession?”
“Retract! impossible!”
“Do you repent—regret having made it, Cecilia?”
“Repent—regret having made it. No, mother, no!” replied Cecilia firmly. “I only regret that it was not sooner made. Retract!—impossible I could wish to retract the only right thing I have done, the only thing that redeems me in my inmost soul from uttermost contempt. No! rather would I be as I am, and lose that noble heart, than hold it as I did, unworthily. There is, mother, as you said—as I feel, a sustaining—a redeeming power in truth.”