“Ah!” Lottie cried, her face lighting up. But she added, after a moment, “I am too ignorant to be worth talking to; you will be disgusted. I never thought much about Handel. It was not Handel, it was that.” A flush of colour came over her face with the recollection. She was too uninstructed (notwithstanding the neighbourhood of the Abbey) to have fully woke up to Handel or anyone. “I suppose I have heard it and did not pay much attention to it,” she said; “it was singing it. One does not understand at first—till suddenly one hears one’s self, and you say, ‘What is this that is speaking; what is this? it cannot be me!’”
“I think I understand—a little,” said Rollo doubtfully; “though it is simply you that makes a something quite familiar, a piece of music we have all heard a hundred times, become a new revelation to us all in a moment. I am going away, Miss Despard, and it may be some time before I return. Would you do me such a great favour—which I have no right to ask—as to sing me something now before I go?”
But Lottie would not sing. She said, “Oh no, no,” with a half terror which he did not understand, and which she did not understand herself. The tone was one which forbade the repetition of the request. He begged her pardon anxiously, and there was a little languid conversation about other subjects, and then he rose. He put out his hand again, looking into her eyes, which she raised shyly, almost for the first time. Rollo had a way of looking into the eyes of women to whom he wished to make himself agreeable. It is sometimes very impertinent, and always daring, but, especially when the woman’s imagination is on the side of the gazer, it is very efficacious. Lottie was entirely inexperienced, and she trembled under this look, but felt it penetrate to her very heart.
“Till we meet again,” he said, with a smile, holding her hand for that necessary moment while he said his good-by. “It will not be very long; and I hope that you will be kind to me, Miss Despard, and let me hear you——”
“Good-by,” said Lottie. She could not bear it any longer. She blamed herself afterwards for being rude, as she sat down and went over the incident again and again. She seemed to herself to have dismissed him quite rudely, pulling her hand away, cutting short what he was saying. But Rollo, for his part, did not feel that it was rude. He went down the narrow stairs with his heart beating a little quicker than usual, and a sense that here was something quite fresh and novel, something not like the little flirtations with which he was so familiar, and which amused him a great deal in general. This he had just touched, floated over with his usual easy sentiment, was something quite out of the common. It startled him with the throb in it. He went away quite thoughtful, his heart in a most unusual commotion, and forgot until he was miles away from St. Michael’s that Lottie Despard was to be the English prima donna, who was to make his fortune, if properly managed. “Ah, to be sure, that was it!” he said to himself suddenly in the railway carriage, as he was going to town. He really had forgotten what it was that took him to town at this unsuitable moment of the year.
The rest of the morning glided dreamily away after an incident like this; and it was not till late in the afternoon that Lottie suddenly awoke to the necessity of making an effort, and shaking off the empire of dreams: and this was how she became convinced of the necessity for doing so. She had been sitting, as on the former occasion, with a basket of mending by her when Rollo came in. She had all the clothes of the household to keep in order, and naturally they were not done in one day. After Mr. Ridsdale was gone, she took up her work languidly, keeping it on her knee while she went over all that had happened, again and again, as has been recorded. When, at last startled by a sound outside, she began to work in earnest, then and there a revelation of a character totally distinct from that made by Handel burst upon her. It was not a revelation of the same kind, but it was very startling. Lottie found—that she had not yet finished the hole in the sock which she had begun to mend before Mr. Ridsdale’s first visit! She was still in the middle of that one hole. She remembered exactly where she stuck her needle, in the middle of a woolly hillock, as she heard him coming upstairs; and there it was still, in precisely the same place. This discovery made her heart jump almost as much as Mr. Ridsdale’s visit had done. What an evidence of wicked idling, of the most foolish dreaming and unprofitable thought was in it! Lottie blushed, though she was alone, to the roots of her hair, and seizing the sock with an impassioned glow of energy, never took breath till the stern evidence of that hole was done away with. And then she could not give herself any rest. She felt her dreams floating about her with folded pinions, ready to descend upon her and envelope her in their shadow if she gave them the chance; but she was determined that she would not give them the chance. As soon as she had finished the pair of socks, and folded them carefully up, she went to look for Law to suggest that they should go immediately to Mr. Ashford. Law had only just come in from a furtive expedition out of doors, and had scarcely time to spread his books open before him when she entered his room. But he would not go to Mr. Ashford. It was time enough for that, and he meant in the meantime to “work up” by himself, he declared. Lottie became more energetic than ever in the revulsion of feeling, and determination not to yield further to any vanity. She pleaded with him, stormed at him, but in vain. “At the worst I can always ’list,” he said, half in dogged resistance to her, half in boyish mischief to vex her. But he would not yield to her desire to consult Mr. Ashford, though he had assented at first. He did not refuse to go “some time,” but nothing that she could say would induce him to go now. This brought in again all the contradictions and cares of her life to make her heart sore when she turned back out of the enchanted land in which for a little while she had been delivered from these cares. They all came back upon her open-mouthed, like wild beasts, she thought. Law resisting everything that was good for him, and her father——. But Lottie could not realise the change that threatened to come upon her through her father. It seemed like the suggestion of a dream. Law must be deceived, it must be all a delusion, it was not possible, it was not credible. The Captain came in early that night, and he came upstairs into the little drawing-room, to which he had no habit of coming. He told his daughter in a stately way that he heard her singing had given great satisfaction at the Deanery. “More than one person has mentioned it to me,” he said; “that is of course a satisfaction. And—who is the gentleman you have been having here so much?”
“There has been no one here very much,” said Lottie; then she blushed in spite of herself, though she did not suppose that was what he alluded to. “You do not mean Mr. Ridsdale?” she said.
“How many visitors have you got?” he said, in high good humour. “Perhaps it is Mr. Ridsdale—Lady Caroline’s nephew? Ah, I like the family. It was he you sang to? Well, no harm; you’ve got a very pretty voice—and so had your mother before you,” the Captain added, with a carefully prepared sigh.
“It was only once,” said Lottie, confused. “Mrs. O’Shaughnessy was here; it was after we had been singing at the Deanery; it was——”
“My child,” said the Captain, “I am not finding fault. No harm in putting your best foot foremost. I wish you’d do it a little more. At your age you ought to be thinking about getting married. And, to tell the truth, it would be a great convenience to me, and suit my plans beautifully, if you would get married. You mustn’t stand shilly-shallying; let him come to the point: or, if he won’t, my dear, refer him to me.”