“And I hope that will not be long,” said the good woman, delighted. She swept along the Dean’s Walk, letting her dress trail after her and holding her head high; she was too much excited to think of holding up her skirts. “Did ye hear him, Lottie, me honey? ‘If you see my aunt,’ says he. Lord bless the man! as if me Lady Caroline was in the way of looking in and taking a cup of tea! Sure, I’d make her welcome, and more sense than shutting herself up in that old house, and never stirring, no, not to save her life. ‘If ye see my aunt,’ says he. Oh, yes! me darlint, I’ll see her, shut up in her state, and looking as if—— He’ll find the difference when he comes to the Deanery, as he says. Not for you, Lottie, me dear; you’re one of themselves, so to speak. But it’s not much thanks me Lady Caroline will give him for sending her a message by Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. I thought I’d burst out in his face, ‘Tell her ye met me by the Abbey door.’ That’s to save me lady’s feelings, Lottie. But I’ll do his bidding next time I see her; I’ll make no bones of it, I’ll up and give her my message. Lord! just to see how me lady would take it. See if I don’t now. For him, he’s a jewel, take me word for it, Lottie; and ye’ll be a silly girl, me honey, if you let a gentleman like Mr. Ridsdale slip through your fingers. A real gentleman—ye can see as much by his manners. If I’d been a duchess, Lottie, me dear, what more could he say?”
Lottie made no reply to this speech, any more than to the words Rollo himself had addressed to her. Her mind was all in a confused maze of happy thoughts and anticipations. His looks, his words, were all turned to the same delicious meaning; and he was coming back to the Deanery, when she was to be “more generous” to him. No compliment could have been so penetrating as that soft reproach. Lottie had no words to spend upon her old friend, who, for her part, was sufficiently exhilarated to require no answer. Mrs. O’Shaughnessy rang the changes upon this subject all the way to the Lodges. “‘When you see my aunt,’ says he.” The idea that she was in the habit of visiting Lady Caroline familiarly not only amused but flattered her, though it was difficult enough to understand how this latter effect could come about.
Rollo was himself moved more than he could have imagined possible by this encounter. He said nothing as he followed his companions to the Signor’s house, and did not even remark what they were saying, so occupied was he in going over again the trivial events of the last few minutes. As he did so, it occurred to him for the first time that Lottie had not so much as spoken to him all the time; not a word had she said, though he had found no deficiency in her. It was evident, then, that there might be a meeting which should fill a man’s mind with much pleasant excitement and commotion, and leave on his thoughts a very delightful impression, without one word said by the lady. This idea amused him in the pleasant agitation of his being to which the encounter at the church door had given rise. He forgot what he had come for, and the rudeness of his partner, and the refusal of that personage to think at all of Lottie. He did not want any further discussion of this question; he had forgotten, even, that it could require to be discussed. Somehow all at once, yet completely, Lottie had changed character to him; he did not want to talk her over with anyone, and he forgot altogether the subject upon which the conversation must necessarily turn when he followed the Signor and his big companion through the groups of people who began to emerge from the Abbey. There were a great many who stared at Rollo, knowing who he was, but none who roused him from his preoccupation. Fortunately the Dean had a cold and was not visible, and Lady Caroline did not profess to go to church in the afternoon—“It was too soon after lunch, and there were so many people, and one never felt that one had the Abbey to one’s self,” her ladyship said.
The Manager went off to Italy the next day, after his Milanese, without being at all restrained by Rollo, who was glad to get rid of him, and to have no more said about the English prima donna. He did not quite like it even, so perverse was he, when the Signor, sitting out upon his terrace, defended her against the impresario’s hasty verdict: “She has a beautiful voice, so far as that goes,” the Signor said, with the gravity of a judge; “you are mistaken if you do not admire her voice; we have had occasion to hear it, and we know what it is, so far as that goes.”
“You dog!” said the jovial Manager, with a large fat laugh. “I see something else if I don’t see that. Ah, Rossinetti! hit too?”
“Do you happen to know what he means?” said the Signor with profound gravity, turning his fine eyes upon Ridsdale. “Ah! it is a pleasantry, I suppose. I have not the same appreciation of humour that I might have had, had I been born an Englishman,” he said, with a seriousness that was portentous, without relaxing a muscle.
Rollo, who was not aware of the vehement interest with which the Signor espoused Purcell’s cause, felt the Manager’s suspicions echo through his own mind. He knew how entirely disinclined he felt to enter upon this question. Was his companion right, and had the Signor been hit too? It seemed to Rollo that the wonder was how anyone could avoid that catastrophe. The Manager made very merry, as they went back to town, upon Lottie’s voice and the character of the admiration which it had excited; but all this Rollo received with as much solemnity of aspect as characterised the Signor.
CHAPTER XXI.
SEARCHINGS OF HEART.
It was not to be supposed that the visit of Rollo and his companion should pass unnoticed in so small a community as that of St. Michael’s, where everybody knew him, and in which he had all the importance naturally belonging to a member, so to speak, of the reigning family. Everybody noticed his appearance in the Abbey, and it soon became a matter of general talk that he was not at the Deanery, but had come down from town expressly for the service, returning by as early a train afterwards as the Sunday regulations of the railway allowed. What did he come for? Not to see his relations, which would have been a comprehensible reason for so brief a visit. He had been seen talking to somebody at the north door, and he had been seen following the Signor, in company with a large and brilliant person who wore more rings and studs and breloques than had ever been seen at St. Michael’s. Finally, this remarkable stranger, who was evidently a friend of the Signor as well as of Rollo, had been visible on the little green terrace outside Rossinetti’s sitting-room, smoking cigarettes and drinking claret-cup, and tilting up his chair upon two legs in a manner which suggested a tea-garden, critics said, more than a studious nook sheltered among the buttresses of the Abbey. Public opinion was instinctively unfavourable to Rollo’s companion; but what was the young prince, Lady Caroline’s nephew, doing there? Then the question arose, who was it to whom Rollo had been talking at the north door? All the Canons and their wives, and the ladies in the Lodges, and even the townspeople, when the story reached them, cried out “Impossible!” when they were told that it was Mrs. O’Shaughnessy. But that lady had no intention of concealing the honour done her. She published it, so to speak, on the housetops. She neglected no occasion of making her friends acquainted with all the particulars of the interview. “And who should it have been but me?” she said. “Is there e’er another one at St. Michael’s that knows as much of his family? Who was it but an uncle of his, or maybe it might be a cousin, that was in the regiment with us and O’Shaughnessy’s greatest friend? Many’s the good turn the Major’s done him; and, say the worst you can o’ the Ridsdales, it’s not ungrateful they are. It’s women that are little in their ways. What does a real gentleman care for our little quarrels and the visiting list at the Deanery? ‘When ye see me aunt,’ says he, ‘Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, ye’ll tell her——’ Sure he took it for certain that me Lady Caroline was a good neighbour, and would step in of an afternoon for her bit of talk and her cup o’ tea. ‘You’ll tell her,’ says he, ‘that I hadn’t time to go and see her.’ And, please God, I will do it when I’ve got the chance. If her ladyship forgets her manners, it shall ne’er be said that O’Shaughnessy’s wife was wanting in good breeding to a family the Major had such close connections with.”
“But do you really know—Mr. Ridsdale’s family?” said Lottie, after one of these brilliant addresses, somewhat bewildered by her recollection of what had passed. “And, sure, didn’t you hear me say so? Is it doubting me word you are?” said Mrs. O’Shaughnessy, with a twinkle in her eye. Lottie was bewildered—but it did not matter much. At this moment nothing seemed to matter very much. She had been dull, and she had been troubled by many things before the wonderful moment in which she had discovered Rollo close to her in the Abbey—much troubled, foreseeing with dismay the closing in around her of a network of new associations in which there could be nothing but pain and shame, and dull with a heavy depression of dulness which no ray of light in the present, no expectation in the future, seemed to brighten. Purcell’s hand held out to her, tenderly, yet half in pity, had been the only personal encouragement she had; and that had humbled her to the dust, even though she struggled with herself to do him justice. Her heart had been as heavy as lead. There had seemed to her nothing that was hopeful, nothing that was happy before her. Now all the heaviness had flown away. Why? Why, for no reason at all, because this young man, whom she supposed (without any warrant for the foolish idea) to love her, had come back for an hour or two; because he was coming back on a visit. The visit was not to her, nor had she probable share in the enjoyments to be provided for Lady Caroline’s nephew; and Lottie did not love him to make his very presence a delight to her. She did not love him—yet. This was the unexpressed feeling in her mind; but when a girl has got so far as this it may be supposed that the visit of the lover whom she does not love—yet, must fill her with a thousand delightful tremors. How could she doubt his sentiments? What was it that brought him back and back again to St. Michael’s? And to be led along that flowery way to the bower of bliss at the end of it, to be persuaded into love by all the flatteries and worship of a lover so delicately impassioned—could a girl’s imagination conceive anything more exquisite?—No, she was not in love—yet—— But there was no reason why she should not be, except the soft maidenly reluctance, the shy retreat before one who kept advancing, the instinct of coy resistance to an inevitable delight.