“Pooh! nonsense! All fancy that. Lovers’ dead are easily buried,” said Sir Simon, affecting a cheerfulness he was very far from feeling. He knew better than Clide how ill-fitted Franceline was, both by the sensitive delicacy of her own nature and the inherited delicacy of a consumptive mother, to bear up against such a blow as that which threatened her; but he would not lacerate the poor fellow’s heart by letting him share these gloomy forebodings that were based on surer ground than the sentimental fears of a lover. Perhaps the expression of his undisciplined features—the brow that could frown but knew not how to dissemble; the lip that could smile so kindly, or curl in contempt, but knew not how to lie; the eye that was the faithful, even when the unconscious, interpreter of the mind—may have said more to Clide than was intended.
“I trust you to watch over her,” he said; and then added in a tone that went to Sir Simon’s very heart, “don’t spare me if it can help you to spare her. Tell her I am a blackguard—it’s true by comparison; compared to her snow-white purity and angelic innocence of heart, I am no better than a false and selfish brute. Blacken me as much as you like—make her hate me—anything rather than that she should suffer, or guess what I am suffering. God knows I would bear it and ten times worse to shield her from one pang!”
“That is spoken like yourself,” said the baronet. “I recognize your father’s son now.”
They grasped each other’s hands in silence. Clide was opening the door when suddenly he turned round and said with a smile of touching pathos:
“You will not begin the blackening process at once? You will wait till we know if it is necessary?”
“All right—you may trust me,” was the rejoinder, and they went together into the breakfast-room.
They had the carriage to themselves. Clide was glad of it. It was a strange fatality that drew these two men, alike only in name, so closely together in the most trying crises of the younger man’s life. He spoke of it gratefully, but bitterly.
“Yes, your support is the one drop of comfort granted me in this trouble, as it was in the other,” he said, as the train carried them through the green fields and past many a spot made dear and beautiful by memory; “it is abominably selfish of me to use it as I do, but where should I be without it! I should have been in a mad-house before this if it were not for you, uncle, hunted as I am like a mad-dog. What have I done so much worse than other men to be cursed like this!”
The admiral had hitherto been as gentle towards his nephew as a fond but awkward nurse handling a sick child; but he turned on him now with a severe countenance.