“Is Roland Hamerton coming here?”
“With Rex, I think. Oh, yes, he is sure to come—he is great friends with Rex. I am so glad the boy should have such a steady, nice friend. But we cannot take him in at Bonport, and of course he never would expect such a thing. Perhaps you will mention at the bureau, Mr. Everard, that some friends of mine will be wanting rooms.”
“I had no idea,” said John, with a tone of annoyance, “that so large a party was expected.”
“Rex?” said Mrs. Lennox, with simple audacity. “Well, I hope you don’t think I could refuse our own boy when he wanted to come.”
“He ought to have been at school,” the guardian grumbled under his breath.
“John! when you agreed yourself he was doing no good at school; and the masters said so, and everybody. And he is too young to go to Oxford; and whatever you may think, John, I am very glad to know that a nice, good, steady young man like Roland Hamerton has taken such a fancy to Rex. Oh, yes, he has taken a great fancy to him—he is staying with him now. It shows that though the poor boy may be a little wilful, he is thoroughly nice in his heart. Though even without that,” said Mrs. Lennox, ready to weep, “I should always be glad to see Roland Hamerton, shouldn’t you, Rosalind? He is always good and kind, and we have known him, and Rosalind has known him, all his life.”
Rosalind made no reply to this appeal. She was in no mood to say anything, to take any part in common conversation. Her time of peace and repose was over. If there had been nothing else, the sudden information only now conveyed to her of the coming of Rivers and of Hamerton, with what motive she knew too well, would have been enough to stop her mouth. She heard this with a thrill of excitement, of exasperation, and at the same time of alarm, which is far from the state of mind supposed by the visionary philosopher to whom it seems meet that a good girl should have seven suitors. Above all, the name of Rivers filled her with alarm. He was a man who was a stranger, who would insist upon an answer, and probably think himself ill-used if that answer was not favorable. With so many subjects of thought already weighing upon her, to have this added made her brain swim. And when she looked up and caught, from the other side of the table, a wistful gaze from those eyes which had so long haunted her imagination, Rosalind’s dismay was complete. She shrank into herself with a troubled consciousness that all the problems of life were crowding upon her, and at a moment when she had little heart to consider any personal question at all, much less such a one as this.
The party round the dinner-table was thus a very agitated one, and by degrees less and less was said. The movements of the servants—Mrs. Lennox’s agile courier and John Trevanion’s solemn English attendant, whose face was like wood—became very audible, the chief action of the scene. To Everard the silence, broken only by these sounds and by Mrs. Lennox’s voice coming in at intervals, was as the silence of fate. He made exertions which were really stupendous to find something to say, to seize the occasion and somehow divert the catastrophe which, though he did not know what it would be, he felt to be hanging over his head; but his throat was dry and his lips parched, notwithstanding the wine which he swallowed in his agitation, and not a word would come. When the ladies rose to leave the table, he felt that the catastrophe was very near. He was paralyzed by their sudden movement, which he had not calculated upon, and had not even presence of mind to open the door for them as he ought to have done, but stood gazing with his mouth open and his napkin in his hand, to find himself alone and face to face with John Trevanion. He had not thought of this terrible ordeal. In the hotel life to which he had of late been accustomed, the awful interval after dinner is necessarily omitted, and Everard had not been brought up in a society which sits over its wine. When he saw John Trevanion bearing down upon him with his glass of wine in his hand, to take Mrs. Lennox’s place, he felt that he did not know to what trial this might be preliminary, and turned towards his host with a sense of danger and terror which nothing in the circumstances seemed to justify, restraining with an effort the gasp in his throat. John began, innocently enough, by some remark about the wine. It was very tolerable wine, better than might have been expected in a country overrun by visitors. “But I suppose the strangers will be going very soon, as I hear the season is nearly over. Have you been long here?”
“A month—six weeks I mean—since early in August.”
“And did you come for the ‘cure’? You must have taken a double allowance.”