Miss Berwick, her eyes streaming with tears, was clinging to a man's arm; and, what made the scene the more unreal, the more incredible, to the amazed onlooker, Boringdon knew the man quite well, and had often, in his young importance, looked down on him as being so much less intimate at Bosworth House than he was himself. The man into whose plain, powerful face Arabella Berwick was gazing with such agonised intensity was Daniel O'Flaherty, an Irish barrister, but lately come to practise at the English Bar, a Paddy whose brogue—so Berwick had assured his friend Boringdon—you could cut with a knife, but who was, he had added good-naturedly, said by many people to be a clever fellow!
And now Oliver was walking straight upon them,—on O'Flaherty and Arabella Berwick. He stopped short, staring with fascinated, horror-stricken eyes, making no effort to pass by, to show the decent hypocrisy he should have shown; and what he heard made it only too easy to reconstitute the story. Miss Berwick had also dreamed her dream, and she was now engaged in deliberately putting it from her.
At last the man had cut the painful scene short, but not before Boringdon had seen the woman, whom he had himself set on so high a pedestal, fling her arms round her companion's neck in one last agonised attempt to say good-bye. It was the Irishman, of whom Boringdon had made such small account in his own mind, who at last—with the measured dignity born of measureless grief and loss—led her towards the spectator whom he vaguely recognised as one of James Berwick's younger friends. "Perhaps you will kindly take Miss Berwick home?" and then he had turned and gone, and she who had renounced him, taking no heed of Boringdon, had stood and gazed after him as long as he remained in sight.
During the walk back to Bosworth House it had been Boringdon's lot to listen while his companion told him, with a sort of bald simplicity, the truth.
"I love him, Mr. Boringdon, with all my heart—with all my body—with all my soul! But certain things are impossible in this world,—apart from everything else, there is the fact that for the present we are both penniless. He admits that often years go by before a man situated as he is makes any real way at the Bar. I ought not to have allowed it to come to this! I have been a fool,—a fool!" She had tried to smile at him. "Take example by me, Mr. Boringdon, never allow yourself to really care. It's not worth it!"
She had gone on, taking very little notice of him, talking as if to herself—"Of course I shall never marry, why should I? I have James,—till now I have never cared for anything but James." Then at last had come a word he had felt sorely. Arabella Berwick had looked at him with something like fear in her eyes,—"You will not say anything of this to my brother, Mr. Boringdon? I trust to your honour,"—much as she might have spoken to a schoolboy, instead of to a man—a man, as he angrily reminded himself, of one-and-twenty!
How well he remembered it all still, and yet what a long time ago all that happened! He himself had altered, incredibly, in these short years. O'Flaherty was no longer an unknown, uncouth Irishman: he had won a place even in the Berwicks' high little world: steady, moderate adherence to his country's unpopular cause had made him something of a personage even in the House of Commons, and he was known to be now earning a large,—nay, a huge,—income at the Bar. Of the two men who at one and the same moment had loved Arabella Berwick, it was he who had forged ahead, Oliver Boringdon who had lagged behind.
And the heroine of the adventure? She was still what all those about her, with the possible exception of these two men, had always thought her to be—the accomplished, rather cold, brilliant woman of the world, content to subordinate exceptional intellectual gifts to the exigencies of her position as mistress of her uncle's house; bending her fine mind to the problem of how to stretch Lord Bosworth's always uncertain and encumbered income to its furthest possible limit, for one of Miss Berwick's virtues had always been a great horror of debt. More, she had so fashioned her life during the last ten years that she was regarded by many shrewd observers as being quite as remarkable a person as her brother—in fact, where he was concerned, the power behind the throne. She loved, too, to exercise her power, to obtain good places for her favourites, to cause some humble climber of the ladder of fame to leap at one bound several of the hard intervening bars. It was admitted that the only strong feeling finding place in her heart was love of her brother, James Berwick, and for him, in a worldly sense, she had indeed done well.
Since that afternoon, twelve years before, Miss Berwick and Oliver Boringdon had never been on really cordial terms. She had at first tried, foolishly, to make a friend of him, a confidant, but he had not been possessed of the requisite amount of philosophy, and she had drawn back mortified at the condemnation, even at the dislike, which she had read in his eyes.
Very early Berwick had said to his friend, "I don't know what has happened to my sister and yourself, old fellow, but it will not make any difference to us, will it?" But, as Boringdon was well aware, it had made a difference. The sister's influence was on the whole always thrown in against that of the friend. It had certainly not been with Miss Berwick's goodwill that Boringdon had been offered, through her brother's intermediary, work which would bring him within two miles of Lord Bosworth's country house; but Oliver Boringdon was very rarely at Fletchings, and never without a direct invitation from its mistress.