“Yes,” said Cicely, as quietly as before, “she is.”
Then at last she turned away. But not in time to check by her gravity, a very slight, the very slightest of smiles, which Mrs. Methvyn was telegraphing to her daughter from her corner of the carriage, and which unfortunately did not reach its destination unperceived by Mr. Guildford.
He did not like it at all. He began to grow cross again, and would have succeeded in becoming thoroughly so had there been time for the completion of the process. But there was not. Just then the carriage turned in at the lodge on the Greybridge Road, and in two minutes more drew up in front of the ivy-clad porch of the Abbey, and everybody’s attention was given to helping the invalid out, and in the little bustle Mr. Guildford forgot all about his impending crossness and its cause.
He had time to get back into a very happy and amiable state of mind before he left, for he stayed till even the last lights of the long July day had sunk into the soft, mellow darkness of a midsummer night. And as he walked back to Greybridge station—slowly, all but indifferent to whether he lost the last train to Sothernbay or not, enjoying the delicious summer scents of new mown hay and dewy grass and sleeping flowers which came to him in mysterious wafts from unseen fields and hedgerows—it seemed to him as it had seemed on that bright May morning that now looked long ago, that the world was a happy place, and life a blessed thing, and that the future was rich with golden possibilities.
For Midsummer’s day must come once a year even in the coldest lands—and to all of us there must be midsummer once in life—a pause of mingled joy and hope, a living in the blissful present, a foolish dream of its continuance!
And for a while it almost seemed to the young man as if he had succeeded in cheating time into restfulness. He thought himself so different from other men, he thanked God that he was not as they, he stood strong and serene in his self-dominion; he had mastered his life and mapped it out as, it seemed to him, to the best advantage for his fellow-creatures in the special direction in which he felt that he could benefit them. And hitherto his intentions had been fulfilled, and his efforts crowned with success, and the future lay bright before him. He had worked hard, he had allowed nothing to beguile him from his labours, he felt that he had earned a right to some rest and enjoyment when they came in his way. And they offered themselves in so attractive and refined a form at this time; he felt that the society of such a woman as Cicely Methvyn could not but benefit as well as refresh him. He congratulated himself on the perfect knowledge of himself, and on the clear sighted resolution which enabled him to enjoy a pleasure and advantage of the kind with no fear of their leading him too far. For as firmly as ever he believed in his own theories, as determinedly as when he had aroused his sister’s indignation by the expression of his ideas on the subject, was he resolved that when he did marry, his choice should not fall upon a woman of character or intellect likely to lead her beyond the charmed circle of “her own sphere.” The only change in his feelings was an apparently unimportant one. Lately, quite lately, he had begun to doubt if he would marry at all.
“That lovely little cousin of Miss Methvyn’s,” he said to himself, as he was walking to Greybridge that night, “so she has gone away with the Fawcetts! I hope that young Fawcett is not amusing himself with her. He is not likely to be in earnest, for his family would be sure to think her beneath him—poor girl—she is too pretty to be in anything even approaching a dependent position.”
And a vague notion, born half of a sort of chivalry towards Geneviève, half of his admiration of her beauty, floated across his mind, of this innocent little creature as a possible wife. Did she not possess every qualification he had pronounced desirable? She was more than pretty, sweet-tempered certainly—who so gentle and clinging could be otherwise?—unselfish, he felt assured, transparent to a degree; the last sort of woman to trouble herself with understanding matters “too great for her,” or to dream of discontent with her own domain. Yet it had annoyed him to imagine that Cicely had had any deeper meaning than her words had expressed in her remarks about Geneviève that afternoon; the grave inquiry in her eyes had irritated him as much as the smile he had detected on her mother’s face.
“It is so like women to be always jumping to conclusions; their heads are always running on lovers and marriage, but I had fancied Miss Methvyn quite above such folly,” he said to himself by way of explanation of his annoyance.
Then he forgot all about Geneviève, and began considering how to arrange his work for the next day so as to be free to be at the Abbey again on that following, as he had promised to be if the weather should be fine enough for Colonel Methvyn to go out again.