Its seed was of her own sowing, and had been fostered with the greatest care. It was to be expected, therefore, that the sight of its strength and vigour should fill her with gratification.
The week that Sybil spent with her kind friends was the happiest she had ever known. Lessons at the Rue des Lauriers were suspended for the time; Lotty was allowed, by her uncle’s intercession, to spend some afternoons with her little sister. She was sorry for Sybil, and anxious to make up to her for her roughness and unkindness.
The two little sisters appeared to cling to each other more fondly and closely than had been the case for long; a state of things the good influences about them were not likely to discourage. With much care Marion and Sir Ralph endeavoured to efface from poor Sybil’s mind the recollection of her midnight terrors; and to some extent succeeded. Though so vainly nervous and impressionable, the child was also sensible, and by no means deficient in reasoning powers. By the end of the week she perfectly understood and believed that no real grounds for her alarm had existed; though at the same time, she begged that she might not again be asked to sleep in the room where he had passed so many hours or misery. This request was of course acceded to, and her future comfort further ensured by a kindly; and trustworthy young woman, an elder sister of the amiable Thérèse, being engaged in the place of the objectionable Emilie.
During this week Sir Ralph was naturally good deal at Mrs. Archer’s house, which, as might have been expected, did not tend to increase his peace of mind. The state of calm equability which, during his absence from Altes, he believed himself to have attained, lasted only till he was again in Marion’s presence. After much resistance, many struggles, he gave in; resigning himself to his fate and to the intense enjoyment of the present.
“After all,” thought he, “I suppose it’s not much worse for me than for other people. I am certainly not likely to go in for this sort or thing twice in my life, and I may as well take the wretched little taste of happiness that has come in my way, for the very short time it can last.”
“For happiness it was, though certainly of curious kind. He perfectly believed her to be engaged to marry another man, one too, whom he could quite imagine it possible that she cared for sincerely, though not perhaps to the full extent that a nature such as hers was capable of. He believed, too, that under any circumstances, it would have been impossible for her to care for him, the man Ralph Severn, to even this same small extent; besides which his circumstances were such that he considered marriage, at least for many years to come, as all but out of the question for him. He knew all this, he repeated it over to himself a dozen times a day—and yet—and yet—he could not stay away from her; it was happiness even to be in the same room with her. She was so sweet, so gentle; and yet so bright and intelligent! A merely sweet and gentle woman would not have contented Ralph Severn; would not, though her beauty might have ten times exceeded that of Marion Vere, have made him feel, as she did, that here indeed was one who suited him—yes, “to the innermost fibre of his being.”
So he went on, playing, alas, with edged tools; knowing full well that the day was not far distant when they would cut him, and deeply too. But thinking not, be it remembered in his defence, that there was the slightest danger of their wounding another as well as himself. Another, not perhaps capable of deeper suffering than he, but a gentle, tender creature. One to whom such suffering would be hard and strange; who would not, improbably, sink altogether beneath it. And one, too, whom he loved—this strong, brave man—loved, though as yet he hardly knew it, so entirely, so intensely, that to save her, he would gladly have agreed to bear through life the burden of her sorrow in addition to his own.
But for this little space, he went dreaming on. There was not just yet anything exactly to awaken him. Besides, he thought himself so particularly wide awake! The remembrance of Frank Berwick’s existence was never absent from him. He looked upon it as a sort of charm, a safeguard against any possible imprudence. Every now and then he used to give himself a little prick with it, as a sort of wholesome reminder, as it were. He noticed certainly that the young man was seldom, if ever, named by either Mrs. Archer or Marion; but that, under the circumstances, was not to be wondered at.
The engagement was not as yet a formally announced one, though he had heard it alluded to, two or three times in other quarters. Frank’s absence was probably connected with arrangements he might be making in preparation for his marriage. In short there were a hundred reasons why they should not care to talk about him. No doubt it was decidedly pleasanter for Ralph that they should not do so. He fancied himself quite prepared for it at any time; but, in point of fact, pricking oneself now and then, in a gingerly manner, by way of testing one’s powers of endurance, is a very different thing from the relentless cut of a doctor’s lancet or the deep, piercing stab of an enemy’s poniard!
Still now and then he felt puzzled. Marion herself puzzled him. In some way she was changed from what she had been when he first knew her. She had never seemed robust though perfectly healthy, but now she looked at times strangely fragile. Her spirits were less equable. Her colour went and came in a way he did like to see. She was always sweet and cheerful, never more so than now; but it sometimes seemed to him that it cost her an effort to appear so. Then, again, she would be so unaffectedly bright and merry, so almost childishly gay and light-hearted, that all his misgivings, so far as she was concerned, vanished as if by magic. And then he found himself back again in his old place, “middle-aged and dull and dried-up,” utterly unsuited to this happy young creature, whom yet, in all her moods, he found so inexpressibly winning and attractive. She liked him—he was sure of that—liked and trusted and respected him, he said to himself, with a mental wry face. “I’m not sure but what I would rather she hated me!” he thought more than once.