“I am really losing my head to-day,” he said. “I had another letter to tell you of, that I received at the same time as my sister’s.” He felt in his pocket again. “Ah yes, here it is.”
He glanced at it for a moment, then put it into her hands. It was from Roma, written in a very different tone from Mrs Eyrecourt’s stiff little note, and, though nominally addressed to Beauchamp, evidently intended for them both.
“An idea has struck me,” wrote Roma, “that though Gertrude cannot now be at Wareborough for your marriage, I might manage to be there instead of her, if you and Eugenia (I may call her so, may I not?) would like it. I do not like the idea of no one of your own side of the house being present. We leave town on Tuesday—Gertrude, as she will have told you, and the children, to join the Chancellors at Torquay, and I to go north again for a month. This is sooner than we had intended, so I have not made any plans for my journey, but I am sure Mary Dalrymple will take me in, if you will ask her about it. Please answer by return, and then I can write to her myself. I do hope my proposal will not be unwelcome.”
“How very nice of her!” exclaimed Eugenia, with sparkling eyes. “I am delighted she is coming. Of course we should have asked her at first if we had known she would care to come. I am so pleased, are not you, Beauchamp?”
“Oh, yes, I don’t mind. I have no objection to her coming,” said Captain Chancellor, indifferently and somewhat absently. He had taken another letter from his pocket and had been glancing over it while Eugenia read Roma’s note. Now he folded it up and put it away, but the perusal of it seemed to have brought a little cloud again to his face.
“Beauchamp, you are very ungrateful. You don’t deserve your cousin—Miss Eyrecourt I mean—to be so good to you,” said Eugenia, reproachfully.
“Don’t I? I fancy I fully deserve all the goodness I get from her,” replied Beauchamp, with a tinge of bitterness in his tone which made Eugenia tell him he had certainly been rubbed the wrong way by some one or something, he was so moody and captious, which little scolding he took in good part and exerted himself to a greater appearance of amiability, till the few hours of his visit were over and he was due again at Bridgenorth.
It was Mrs Eyrecourt’s letter that had irritated and excited him. In it she told him of Roger’s unmistakably hopeless state, mingling regrets that he could not be with the poor boy, “who is so fond of you, you know,” with hints of her sisterly interest in the vast change impending in his own prospects. “I cannot pretend not to think of what is coming as it affects you, dearest Beauchamp. I fear I have always been inclined to be ambitious for you, and now when my pride in you seems likely to have the gratification of seeing you in such a position as the head of your house has always had the power, if he had the will, to fill, I fear I shall not be easily content. I shall expect great things of you. But I am forgetting—I must not run on as if I still held the first place with you. Other ties and influences must now naturally come before mine. And oh, how earnestly I trust I may agree with you that you have done wisely just now! I own that I felt hurt at your having so completely refrained from consulting or confiding in me, but I have tried to put aside all such personal feeling and to believe you may have had reason for acting so strangely to me. So do not imagine that I am the least prejudiced, and remember always that your interests can be dearer to no one than to your sister.”
It was all very reasonable and natural and sisterly, and no doubt Beauchamp should have felt properly grateful and gratified. But all the same the immediate effect of the letter was to make him very cross; and but for Eugenia’s simplicity and unsuspicious sweetness, this last visit to Wareborough might have been a last indeed. And had such a catastrophe occurred, it is hardly to be supposed that Mrs Eyrecourt would have taken it much to heart.
Nothing of the kind came to pass, however. Thursday arrived, a bright, sunny day; the guests respectively made their appearance, and Eugenia Laurence was married to Beauchamp Chancellor without more ado, finding it, when it came to the point, a harder matter to say farewell to father and sister and to “home,” even though only a dingy old house in a dull Wareborough street, than she had at all been able to anticipate. And it was in tears after all that the bride, whose fondest hopes were realised, who believed herself to be most happy among women, left her father’s house, henceforward to be to him very desolate.