Burgo's Romance

by T. W. Speight

"And yet you say that, as a nurse, no one could be kinder or more attentive than she is?" he presently remarked.

"Begging your pardon, Mr. Burgo, but that may be only part of her artfulness. Some women, sir, are the very----" A discreet cough finished his sentence.

Before Burgo and the old man parted they exchanged addresses. Benny was exhorted to encourage the gossiping proclivities of his wife's niece anent those matters in which Burgo was interested. He, Burgo, would not fail to look him up from time to time, and draw upon his budget of news. Should any information of an alarming kind, bearing on Sir Everard's health, reach him, Mr. Brabazon was to be communicated with without loss of time.

[CHAPTER VI.]

A LAST INTERVIEW.

But there was another matter besides the one he had discussed with Benny Hines, which at this period of his career might not unreasonably be supposed to seriously ruffle that serenity of mind which Mr. Brabazon had heretofore been so successful in cultivating, and that was his love affair with Miss Leslie.

With his uncle's discarding of him, all his hopes in that direction had been irremediably blighted. As a pauper--for he was no more than that now--all thought of love-making was out of the question for years to come, if not for ever. It was true that he had won no promise from Clara, but he had so far declared himself to her at the moment of Mrs. Mordaunt's interruption that he felt it due to both of them that he should find an opportunity of explaining to Miss Leslie that, if he wished her to consider as unsaid the impassioned words he had poured into her ear on that never-to-be-forgotten occasion, it was not because his feelings towards her had undergone the shadow of a change, but because circumstances outside his control had rendered it impossible for him, as an honourable man, to press his suit to an issue. Bitter, very bitter to him, would such a confession be. During the last few months he had dreamt so many dreams of which Clara was the central figure, his imagination had indued her with so many precious attributes, and so full of happy confidence had he been but a little while before, that to find himself at one fell blow robbed of everything, even of hope for the future, had, taken in conjunction with that other stroke of fate, the effect, for the time being, of numbing all his faculties of thought and feeling. For hours he would lie on his back with shut eyes, his senses too dulled to allow of his suffering acutely, while yet what might be termed a slow fever of misery seemed to be eating his very life away.

Among all Mr. Brabazon's acquaintances, and they were more numerous than he could readily have counted, there was not one, perhaps, who would have credited him with the possession of more than that limited--mostly very limited--range of feeling and sensibility with which a somewhat parsimonious Providence has seen fit to endow your average young man about town. Indeed, it is only fair to assume that Burgo himself had no suspicion that there lay dormant within him such heights and depths of passionate but restrained emotion as those which now revealed themselves for the first time. But he was essentially a man of action, and before long he roused himself, although not without an effort, and shook off him a torpor which could not well be otherwise than enervating, and which seemed to him nothing less than a slur on his manhood. And with that his courage came back to him in full measure, and he set himself to confront the future with resolute eyes.

A wild, nay, nothing less than an insane notion, had more than once caught him by the throat, as it were, and for a little while had made his breath come thick and fast. What, he said to himself--what if, when he should tell Clara he was a ruined man, and that she must strive to forget he had ever spoken to her as he had, she were to reply that to her his loss of fortune meant nothing, that her heart was his and ever would be; that she loved him not one jot less now that he was poor than when all the world accepted him as his uncle's heir It was a madman's dream; yet he had read and been told of such things; and there were times when it refused to be scouted, and would "sweetly creep into his study of imagination." But even granting for a moment that such a thing were to come to pass, what then? The circumstances of the case would in no wise be altered. To tie any girl down to his broken fortunes would be both a cruelty and a wrong. It would be very, very sweet to listen to such a confession from the lips he loved--but--après?

Every morning he skimmed the columns of arrivals and departures in the Morning Post in quest of a notification of the return to town of Mrs. Mordaunt and her niece, for he was quite aware that to the elder lady life would have seemed scarcely worth living had her comings and goings failed to be duly recorded in that organ of the elect. At length he found what he was looking for. Mrs. Mordaunt and Miss Leslie had arrived from Paris at No. 6 Cantelupe Gardens. Then, a few days later, in one of the weekly society papers he came across an announcement of the engagement of Miss Leslie and Lord Penwhistle.