As he left the house she heard the door bang, and sitting in the drawing-room knitting him a pair of silk socks, she allowed her smile to broaden till it transformed her face almost to that likeness which Berwick sometimes saw in her, to that of a prim Mistress Quickly.
Boringdon did not go straight down to the Grange. Instead, after having groped his way through the laurel hedges and so into the moonlit road, he turned to the left, and struck out, making a long round before seeking the house for which he was bound.
Both his long talk with Berwick, and the short, strange conversation with his mother, had disturbed and excited him, bringing on a sudden nostalgia for the life he had left, and to which he longed so much to get back. During his eager discussion with the man whom he regarded as being at once his political chief and his political pupil, Chancton and its petty affairs had been forgotten, and yet now, to-night, he told himself with something like dismay that even when talking to Berwick he had more than once thought of Lucy Kemp. The girl had become his friend, his only confidante: into her eager ears he had poured out his views, his aspirations, his hopes, his ambitions, sure always of sympathy, if not of complete understanding. A bitter smile came over his face—no wonder Mrs. Boringdon had so often left them together! Her attitude was now explained.
Boringdon had no wish to pose, even to himself, as a Don Quixote, but, in his views as to the fitting relationship of the sexes, he was most punctilious and old-fashioned, perhaps lacking the essential nobility which would have been required in such a man as himself to accept a fortune, even from a beloved hand. What, take Lucy's £20,000—or was it £25,000—in order to start his bark once more on the perilous political sea? How little his mother understood him if she seriously thought he could bring himself to do such a thing, and in cold blood!
As he strode along in the darkness, there came back to his mind the circumstances connected with an experience in his life which he had striven not unsuccessfully to forget,—the passion of feeling he had wasted, when little more than a boy, on James Berwick's sister.
Those men and women who jeer at first love have surely never felt its potent spell. Twelve years had gone by since Boringdon had dreamed the dream which had to a certain extent embittered and injured the whole of his youth. What a fool he had been! But, on the other hand, so he remembered now, how little he had thought—if indeed he had thought at all—as to any question connected with Arabella Berwick's fortune or lack of it!
Miss Berwick had been mistress of her uncle's house, that Lord Bosworth who was a noted statesman as well as a man of rank: of course she must have money, so Boringdon in his young simplicity had thought, and certainly that belief had been no bar to what he had brought himself tremblingly to believe might come to pass. The beautiful girl, secure in her superior altitude of twenty-five years of life, and an already considerable knowledge of the world, had taken up the clever boy, her brother's Oxford friend, with pretty enthusiasm. She had liked him quite well enough to accept smilingly his adoration, to allow that he should amuse her (so he had realised ever since) in the intervals of a more serious love affair. Well, as he reminded himself to-night, they had been quits! Small wonder indeed that even now, after twelve years had gone by, the recollection of certain bitter moments caused Boringdon to quicken his footsteps!
To-night it all came back to him, in a flood of intolerable memories. It had been late in the season, on the eve—or so he had thought—of his dream's fruition, during the last days of his first spring and summer in London after he had gone down from Oxford. Some merciful angel or some malicious devil—he had never quite known which—had caused him, one Sunday afternoon, while actually on the way to Bosworth House, to turn into Kensington Gardens.
There, in a lonely grassy by-way among the trees, where he had turned aside to think in solitude of his beautiful lady, he had suddenly come on her face to face,—on Arabella Berwick, on his goddess, on the woman whose every glance and careless word had been weighed by him with anxious thought,—finding her in such a guise that for a moment he had believed that his mind, his eyes, were playing him some evil trick.