"Too late! Great Heavens! Answer me, child, I entreat you—I beseech you—is it 'too late' because report is true that you have replaced me with your cousin—that you are engaged to Hervey? Tell me truth now, for pity's sake. I will be trifled with no longer."
Beatrice threw back her haughty little head contemptuously, though ladies don't sneer at the idea of being liées with me generally, I can assure you. Her heart throbbed triumphantly and joyously. She had conquered him at last. The man of giant intellect and haughty will had bowed to her. She held him by a thread, he who ruled the fate of nations!—and she loved him so dearly! But the Pythoness was not wholly tamed, and she could not even yet forget her wrongs.
"You told me before I spoke falsehoods to you, Lord Earlscourt; my word would find no more credence now."
He looked at her, dropped her hand, and turned away, before Beatrice could detain him. Five minutes after he left the house. Little as I guessed it, he was jealous of me—I! who never in my own life rivalled any man who wished to marry! Beatrice had fully revenged herself. I wonder if she enjoyed it quite as much as she had anticipated, as she stood where he had left her looking out on the Green Park?
I went with Beatrice and her party to the Lords that night; it was the tug of war for the bill which Earlscourt was so determined should pass, and a great speech was expected from him. We were not disappointed. When he rose he spoke with effort, and his oratory suffered from the slight hoarseness of his voice, for half the beauty of his rhetoric lay in the flexibility and music of his tones; still, it was emphatically a great speech, and Beatrice Boville listened to it breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on the face—weary, worn, but grandly intellectual—of the man whom Europe reverenced, and she—a girl of twenty!—ruled. Perhaps her heart smote her for the lines she had added there; perhaps she felt her pride misplaced to him, great as he was, with his stainless honor and unequalled genius; perhaps she thought of how, with all his strength, his hand had trembled as it touched hers; and how, with all her love, she had been wilful and naughty to him a second time. His voice grew weaker as he ended, and he spoke with visible effort; still it was one of his greatest political triumphs: his bill passed by a large majority, and the papers, the morning after, filled their leading articles with admiration of Viscount Earlscourt's speech. But before those journals were out, Earlscourt was too ill almost to notice the success of his measures: as he left the House, the presiding devil of beloved Albion, that plays the deuce with English statesmen as with Italian cantatrices,—the confounded east wind,—had caught him, finished what over-exertion had begun, and knocked him over, prostrated with severe bronchitis. What pity it is that the body will levy such cruel black mail upon the mind; that a gust of wind, a horse's plunge, the effluvia of a sewer, the carelessness of a pointsman, can destroy the grandest intellect, sweep off the men whose genius lights the world, as ruthlessly as a storm of rain a cloud of gnats, and strike Peel and Canning, Macaulay and Donaldson, in the prime of their power, as heedlessly as peasants little higher than the brutes, dull as the clods of their own valley, who stake their ambitions on a surfeit of fat bacon, and can barely scrawl their names upon a slate!
Unconscious that Earlscourt's jealousy had fastened so wrongly upon me, I was calling upon Beatrice late the next morning, ignorant myself of his illness, when his physician, who was Lady Mechlin's too, while paying her a complimentary visit, regretted to me my cousin's sudden attack.
"Lord Earlscourt would speak last night," he began. "I entreated him not; but those public men are so obstinate; to-day he is very ill—very ill indeed, though prompt measures stopped the worst. He has risen to dictate something of importance to his secretary; he would work his brain if he were dying; but it has taken a severe hold on him, I fear. I shall send him somewhere south as soon as he can leave the house, which will not be for some weeks. He would be a great loss to the country. We have not such another foreign minister. But I admit to you, Major Hervey—though of course I do not wish it to go further—that I do think very seriously of Lord Earlscourt's state of health."
Beatrice heard him as she sat at her Davenport; her face grew white, and her eyes filled with great anguish. She thought of his words to her only the day before, and of how her pride had repelled him a second time. I saw her hand clinch on the pen she was playing with, and her teeth set tight together, her habitual action under any strong emotion, thinking to herself, no doubt, "And my last words to him were bitter ones!"
When the physician had left, I went up to her.—
"Beatrice, you must let me tell him now!"