CHAPTER XIV.
Edgar rode over the verdant country, wearily, languidly, with a heart that for once was closed to its influence. He was tired of the whole matter. It no longer seemed to him so dreadful a thing to give up Arden, to part from all he cared for. If he could but be done with the pain of it, get it over, have no more trouble. Agitation had worn him out. The thought that he would have another day like yesterday to live through, or perhaps more than one other day, filled his heart with a sick impatience. Why could he not ride on to the nearest railway station, and there take any train, going anywhere, and escape from the whole business? The mere suggestion of this relief was so sweet to him that he actually paused at the cross road which led to the railway. But he was not the kind of man to make an escape. To leave the burthen on others and save himself was the last thing he was likely to do. He touched his horse unconsciously with his whip and broke into a gay canter on the grassy border of the road that led to Thorne. Coraggio! he cried to himself. It would not last so long after all. He would leave no broken bits of duty undone, no ragged edges to his past. A little pain more or less, what did it matter? Honestly and dutifully everything must be done; and, after all, the shame was not his. It was the honest part that was his—the righting of wrong, the abolition of injustice. Strange that it should be he, a stranger to the race, who had to do justice to the Ardens! He was not one of them, and yet he had to act as their head, royally making restitution, disposing of their destinies. He smiled a painful smile as this thought crossed his mind. They were one of the proudest families in England, and yet it fell to a nameless man, a man most likely of no lineage at all, to set them right. If any forlorn consolation was to be got out of it at all it was this.
When Edgar was seen riding up the avenue at Thorne it made a commotion in the house. Mary and Beatrice spied him from the window of the room which had been their schoolroom, and where they still did their practising and wrote their letters to their dearest friends. “Oh, there is Edgar Arden coming to propose to Gussy!” cried Beatrice; and they rushed to the window to have a look at him, and then rushed to the drawing-room to warn the family. “Oh, mamma, oh, Gussy! here’s Edgar Arden!” they cried. Lady Augusta looked up from her accounts with composed looks. “Well, my dear children, I suppose none of us are much surprised,” she said. Gussy, for her part, grew red with a warm glow of rosy colour which suffused her throat and her forehead. “Poor, dear boy!” she said to herself. He had not lost a moment. It was a little past noon, not time for callers yet. He had not lost a moment. She wondered within herself how it would come—if he would ask her to speak to him alone in a formal way—if he would ask her mother—if he would manage it as if by chance? And then what would he say? That question, always so captivating to a girl’s imagination, was soon, very soon, to be resolved. He would tell her he had loved her ever since he knew her—he would tell her—— Gussy’s heart expanded and fluttered like a bird. She would know so soon all about it; how much he cared for her—everything he had to tell.
But they were all shocked by his paleness when he came in. “What have you been doing to yourself?” Gussy cried, who was the most impulsive. “Have you been ill, Mr. Arden?” said sympathetic Ada. They were all ready to gather about him like his sisters, to be sorry for him, and adopt all his grievances, if he had any, with effusion. He felt himself for the moment the centre of all their sympathies, and his hurt felt deeper and more hopeless than it had ever done before.
“I am not in the least ill,” he said, “and I have not been doing anything to speak of; but Fortune has been doing something to me. Lady Augusta, might I have half an hour’s talk with you, if it does not disturb you? I have—something to say——”
“Surely,” said Lady Augusta; and she closed her account-books and put them back into her desk. He meant to take the formal way of doing it, she supposed—a way not so usual as it used to be, but still very becoming and respectful to the fathers and mothers. She hesitated, however, a little, for she thought that most likely Gussy would like the other method best. And she was not so much struck as her daughters were by the change in his looks. Of course, he was a little excited—men always are in such an emergency, more so than women, Lady Augusta reflected; for when it comes to that a woman has made up her mind what is to be the end of it, whereas the man never knows. These reflections passed through her mind as she locked her desk upon the account-books, thus giving him a little time to get by Gussy’s side if he preferred that, and perhaps whisper something in her ear.
But Edgar made no attempt to get by Gussy’s side. He stood where he had stopped after shaking hands with them all, with a faint smile on his face, answering the questions the girls put to him, but visibly waiting till their mother was ready to give him the audience he had asked. “I suppose I must go and put him out of his pain; how anxious he looks, the foolish boy,” Lady Augusta whispered, as she rose, to her eldest daughter. “Mamma, he looks as if he had something on his mind,” Ada whispered back. “I know what he has on his mind,” said her mother gaily. And then she turned round and added aloud, “Come, Mr. Arden, to my little room where I scold my naughty children, and let us have our talk.”
The sisters, it must be said, were a little alarmed when Edgar was thus led away. They came round Gussy and kissed her, and whispered courage. As for the giddy young ones, they tried to laugh, though the solemnity of the occasion was greater than they could have supposed possible. But the others had no inclination to laugh. “It is only agitation, dear, not knowing what your answer may be,” Ada said, though she did not feel any confidence that it was so. “He should not have made so formal an affair of it,” said Helena; “That is what makes him look so grave.” Poor Gussy, who was the most deeply concerned of all, cried. “I am sure there is something the matter,” she said. The three eldest kept together in a window, while Mary and Beatrice roved away in quest of some amusement to fill up the time. And a thrill of suspense and excitement seemed to creep over all the house.
Edgar’s courage came back to him in some degree, as he entered Lady Augusta’s little boudoir. Imagination had no longer anything to do with it, the moment for action had come. He sat down by her in the dainty little chamber, which was hung with portraits of all her children. Just opposite was a pretty sketch of Gussy, looking down upon him with laughing eyes. They were all there in the mother’s private sanctuary, the girls who were her consolation, the boys who were her plague and her delight. What a centre it was of family cares and anxieties! She turned to him cheerfully as she took her chair. She was not in the least afraid of what was coming. She had not even remarked as yet how much agitated he was. “Well, Mr. Arden!” she said.
“I have come to make a very strange confession to you,” said Edgar. “You will think I am mad, but I am not mad. Lady Augusta, I meant to have come to-day to ask you—— to ask if I might ask your daughter to be my wife.”