“She might not what you call like it,” said Lady Markham, dubiously; “and yet she might——”
“Be talked into it, for her good? I wonder,” said Sir Thomas, with spirit, “whether my old friend, who has always been a model woman in my eyes, thinks that would be very creditable to me?”
Lady Markham gave a little conscious guilty laugh, and then, oddly enough, which was so unlike her—twenty-four hours in a sickroom is trying to any one—began to cry. “You flatter me with reproaches,” she said. “Markham asks me if I expect my son to be base; and you ask me how I can be so base myself, being your model woman. I am not a model woman; I am only a woman of the world, that has been trying to do my best for my own. And look there,” she said, drying her eyes; “I have succeeded very well with Con. She will be quite happy in her way.”
“And now,” said Sir Thomas after a pause, “dear friend, who are still my model woman, how about your own affairs?”
She blushed celestial rosy red, as if she had been a girl. “Oh,” she said, “I am going down with Edward to Hilborough to see what it wants to make it habitable. If it is not too damp, and we can get it put in order—I am quite up in the sanitary part of it, you know—he means to send the Gaunts there with their son to recruit, when he is well enough. I am so glad to be able to do something for his old neighbours. And then we shall have time ourselves, before the season is over, to settle what we shall do.”
The reader is far too knowing in such matters not to be able to divine how the marriages followed each other in the Waring family within the course of that year. Young Gaunt, when he got better, confused with his illness, soothed by the weakness of his convalescence and all the tender cares about him, came at last to believe that the debts which had driven him out of his senses had been nothing but a bad dream. He consulted Markham about them, detailing his broken recollections. Markham replied with a perfectly opaque countenance: “You must have been dreaming, old man. Nightmares take that form the same as another. Never heard half a word from any side about it; and you know those fellows, if you owed them sixpence and didn’t pay, would publish it in every club in London. It has been a bad dream. But look here,” he added; “don’t you ever go in for that sort of thing again. Your head won’t stand it. I’m going to set you the example,” he said, with his laugh. “Never—if I should live to be a hundred,” Gaunt cried with fervour. The sensation of this extraordinary escape, which he could not understand, the relief of having nothing to confess to the General, nothing to bring tears from his mother’s eyes, affected him like a miraculous interposition of God, which no doubt it was, though he never knew how. There was another vision which belonged to the time of his illness, but which was less apocryphal, as it turned out—the vision of those two forms through the mist—of one, all white, with pearls on the milky throat, which had been somehow accompanied in his mind with a private comment that at last, false Duessa being gone for ever, the true Una had come to him. After a while, in the greenness of Hilborough, amid the cool shade, he learned to fathom how that was.
But were we to enter into all the processes by which Lady Markham changed from the “That can never be!” of her first light on the subject, to giving a reluctant consent to Frances’ marriage, we should require another volume. It may be enough to say that in after-days, Captain Gaunt—but he was then Colonel—thought Constance a very handsome woman, yet could not understand how any one in his senses could consider the wife of Claude Ramsay worthy of a moment’s comparison with his own. “Handsome, yes, no doubt,” he would say; “and so is Nelly Markham, for that matter,—but of the earth, earthy, or of the world, worldly; whereas Frances——”
Words failed to express the difference, which was one with which words had nothing to do.
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.