Besides, while with me, Clarence was wholly mine; if I might judge by manner, hanging over my embroidery frame while Lady Amabel was writing; or—
Ah! I have said enough of this. He was to leave me now. Would he die? Would he return? or, if he did, would he return true to me, and tell me that he loved me?
You see, under all this strong current of love for him, there were doubts. I hardly recognised them; but they existed nevertheless. I had heard him laugh at “love-stricken damsels,” left by men who had been publicly engaged to them. I recollected his boasting, of giving advice to a young officer, who had gone “a great deal too far,” to get sick leave, and sail for England by the first ship. The young man did not take this advice; he stayed, married, and Clarence called him “a fool.”—Yes, these doubts rose to the surface of my mind, and then—
I heard his voice in the front of the house. I lifted the blind of the dressing-room window, and saw him: he looked harassed, he had been up all night. He was on horseback, and fully accoutred. Oh! was he departing? I dropped the blind; next I heard the rattle of spurs and sword; he had dismounted.
I wiped the tears from my eyes, and ran down to the garden by a back staircase. Clarence had some deer there in a little paddock. I walked mechanically along a grape-walk to the inclosure: the pretty things knew me, for I visited them every day; they put their faces through the railings, and licked my hands. Nelly—he had named one after me—trotted up and down impatiently; she was watching for her master. I suppose he thought that I should be with his favourites; for, ere long, he came through the grape-walk. I hastened to meet him—for agitation and distress overcame my reserve—and we walked up and down the arcade together.
He entreated me not to forget him, said he should be wretched till he returned, and a hundred tender things besides; but I could see that the change from garrison life to active service was exciting to him: he had no idea of temporising with savages, he said; he hoped Sir Adrian would settle the question by “speaking to the Kafirs,” as they said themselves, “with guns.” Oh! it would only be a month’s affair. They were to ride five hundred miles a week till they reached the seat of war; and then, he added, with a gay air, “think how much faster we shall ride back.”
We met Sir Adrian in the garden; he had been looking for Clarence. The Governor was too full of public affairs and his own domestic anxiety to say much to me. A young girl of seventeen, in the full bloom of mirth and beauty, was an agreeable object to him in a ball-room, but he was wont to laugh, like Clarence, at “sorrow-stricken damsels;” he saw I had been weeping, but could enter little into my misery; he uttered some courteous expressions of regret at leaving me to the dulness of Cape Town in the absence of officials; and with more show of feeling than I had seen him exhibit, said, “You will take care of Lady Amabel, my dear Miss Daveney; I am consoled in these hurried moments of departure at the idea of leaving her with so sweet a companion.”
“You must make breakfast for us this morning,” added he, giving me his arm, and leading me through the verandah to the room where the repast was spread.
I sat down passively in the chair Sir Adrian placed for me, and did the honours of the breakfast to the Governor, his staff, and two or three civil functionaries.
Mr Rashleigh was there—obsequious, prosy, and judicial: he was alike despised and disliked in private life; but he was “Sir Adrian’s right hand at Cape Town;” was au fait at the working of the difficult machinery of government from one end of the colony to the other; and, as I afterwards heard, kept up a sort of civil treaty with Mrs Rashleigh, who had never loved him, but who had a thorough sense of the advantages she derived from her position as his wife, surrounded by the appliances, and, what she considered, the state of official life. She had ample evidence against him to procure a divorce if she chose it; but such a proceeding would have been the ruin of both. She had the art to conceal her most glaring errors from the world, and rumours were afloat of stormy debates between this worldly, unprincipled pair: he remonstrating on her extravagance, she defying him, by threatening him with an esclandre that would have deprived him of his high appointment.