Then he fell to thinking what he could do in the direction of distracting his thoughts from his undeserved troubles, seeing that, for the present at least, there was no satisfaction to be got out of Roma. A flirtation with Addie Chancellor was not attractive, and might involve him seriously, watched and guarded as she was. He wished he had not promised Gertrude to stay so long at Winsley; he did not feel at all sure that he would not do more wisely to spend part of his leave elsewhere; he would see about it, very likely something or other would turn up. And, besides, any day might bring things to a crisis with Roma. If not, he could afford to wait a little longer; the best woman in the world was not worth bothering oneself about; and, determined to act upon this comforting doctrine, Captain Chancellor lit another cigar, and having smoked it went calmly to bed. But his sleep was broken, and his dreams uneasy—they were haunted by Eugenia, pale-faced and sad-eyed as he had seen her last. Once it was even worse—he dreamt, he saw her lying dead, and in some unexplained, mysterious way the impression grew strong upon him that he had killed her. He awoke with a start of horror and was thankful to find it a dream—to see, by the faint morning light just beginning to break, the familiar objects in his room, and remember where he was.
“But if this sort of thing goes on,” he said to himself, “I can’t stay here. I must go away—to town even, or to Paris, or somewhere for a change, whether Gertrude likes it or not.”
The next day or two, however, brought something in the way of distraction. Several other guests arrived, of whom two or three of the gentlemen were old and friendly acquaintances of Beauchamp’s, glad to see him again at Winsley—for, unlike many men of his class, he was a favourite with his own sex wherever he choose to be so—and among the accompanying wives and daughters there were some sufficiently attractive for him to find no difficulty in amusing himself in his usual way; on the whole, not to Mrs Eyrecourt’s dissatisfaction. She knew her brother pretty thoroughly. Though her hopes with regard to Adelaide Chancellor had never been alluded to, she felt that Beauchamp was perfectly aware of their existence, and in every smallest detail of his unexceptionably civil behaviour to the girl, she read a tacit defiance of her wishes, a determined opposition to them. Yet she did not despair. She blamed herself for having been injudicious and premature; she owned that Addie, pretty and amiable as she was, was hardly equal to taking her irresistible cousin’s experienced heart by storm. Nevertheless, a little time might do wonders; and in the meanwhile the more general he was in his flirtations the better, and she congratulated herself on her wise selection of guests. She had long ago forgotten her fright about the Wareborough young lady, whose name she had never even heard; all her fears were concentrated in Roma.
Roma was far from happy at this juncture. A painful consciousness was beginning to grow upon her that her relations with Gertrude were not what they had been; for the first time in the several years they had lived together she felt that she was not altogether in her sister-in-law’s confidence; worse than this, that she was no longer thoroughly trusted. And she was at no loss to whose influence to attribute this mortifying change. Scrupulously careful as she was in the regulation of her manner to Beauchamp, that it should not be by a shade more or less familiar than was natural to their acknowledged position of brotherly and sisterly intimacy—indifferent, distant even, as it was now apparently Captain Chancellor’s rôle to appear to her—Roma yet saw clearly that Adelaide’s mother, with her sharp worldly eyes, her conventional suspicion of every unmarried woman not fortunate enough to be an heiress, was on the scent of something below the surface between herself and the man Mrs Chancellor had picked out for her future son-in-law.
“It is all Beauchamp’s fault. It is very cruel of him to place me in such a position. I believe he wants these people to think that he dislikes me, and that I—oh, no, he could not be so horribly coarse,” thought Roma, though she grew furious at the idea. “Why won’t he believe simply that I only care for him as a brother, and let us be comfortable as we used to be? And why is Gertrude so weak as to be turned against me when I have told her so plainly how it is?”
And there were times at which she almost wished that things would come to a crisis, and that she might have the opportunity she had hitherto on every account so carefully avoided of telling Captain Chancellor the plain truth; that to one woman in the world his fascinations were less than nothing. But at present things showed no signs of coming to any such crisis. Beauchamp comported himself to her with exaggerated and obtrusive indifference, and amused himself very comfortably with a handsome Miss Fretville, whose fiancé was safe in India, and (rather more discreetly) with pretty Lady Exyton, whose husband was sixty, and, so long as his dinner was to his taste, calmly tolerant of her ladyship’s harmless little flirtations.
Had the change been less sudden and obtrusive, Roma would have been only too glad to believe it genuine. As it was, she rightly attributed it to pique—a powerful motive in some natures, for wounded vanity has many of the symptoms and sensations of the genuine malady, often enough deceiving even the patient’s self.
End of Volume One.