[CHAPTER XVIII
THE BOX WITH THE LAUREL-WREATH]
SPEID rode home without seeing a step of the way, though he never put his horse out of a walk; he was like a man inheriting a fortune which has vanished before he has had time to do more than sign his name to the document that makes it his. But, in spite of the misery of their parting, he could not and would not realize that it was final. He was hot and tingling with the determination to wear down Lady Eliza’s opposition; for he had decided, with Cecilia’s concurrence or without it, to see her himself, and to do what he could to bring home to her the ruin she was making of two lives.
He could not find any justice in her standpoint; if she had refused to admit him to her house or her acquaintance, there might have been some reason in her act, but she had acknowledged him as a neighbour, invited him to Morphie, and had at times been on the verge of friendliness. She knew that, in spite of any talk that was afloat, he had been well received by the people of the county, for the fact that he had not mixed much with them was due to his own want of inclination for the company offered him. He was quite man of the world enough to see that his presence was more than welcome wherever mothers congregated who had daughters to dispose of, and, on one or two occasions of the sort, he remembered that Lady Eliza had been present, and knew she must have seen it too.
As he had no false pride, he had also no false humility, for the two are so much alike that it is only by the artificial light of special occasions that their difference can be seen. He had believed that Lady Eliza would be glad to give him Cecilia. He knew very well that the girl had no fortune, for it was a truth which the female part of the community were not likely to let a young bachelor of means forget; and he had supposed that a man who could provide for her, without taking her four miles from the gates of Morphie, would have been a desirable suitor in Lady Eliza’s eyes. Her opposition must, as he had been told, be rooted in an unknown obstacle; but, more ruthless than Cecilia, he was not going to let the hidden thing rest. He would drag it to the light, and deal with it as he would deal with anything which stood in his way to her. Few of us are perfect; Gilbert certainly was not, and he did not care what Lady Eliza felt. It was not often that he had set his heart upon a woman, and he had never set his heart and soul upon one before. If he had not been accustomed to turn back when there was no soul in the affair, he was not going to do so now that it was a deeper question.
The curious thing was that, though it went against himself, he admired Cecilia’s attitude enormously; at the same time, the feeling stopped short of imitation. While with her he had been unable to go against her, and the creeping shadow of their imminent parting had wrought a feeling of exaltation in him which prevented him from thinking clearly. But that moment had passed. He understood her feelings, and respected them, but they were not his, and he was going to the root of the matter without scruple.
For all that, it was with a heavy heart that he stood at his own door and saw Macquean, who looked upon every horse as a dangerous wild beast, leading the roan to the stable at the full stretch of his arm. With a heavier one still he sat, when the household had gone to bed, contrasting to-night with yesterday. Last night Whanland had been filled with dreams; to-night it was filled with forebodings. To-morrow he must collect his ideas, and send his urgent request for an interview with Lady Eliza Lamont; and, if she refused to see him, he would put all he meant to ask into writing and despatch the letter by hand to Morphie.
In his writing-table drawer was the chain with the emerald and diamond ends, which he had left there in readiness to give to Cecilia, and he sighed as he took it out, meaning to return it to its iron resting-place in the room by the cellar. What if it should have to rest there for years? He opened the little laurel-wreathed box and drew out the jewel; the drop of green fire lay in his hand like a splash of magic. Though he had no heart for its beauty to-night, all precious gems fascinated Gilbert, this one almost more than any he had ever seen. Emeralds are stones for enchantresses, speaking as they do of velvet, of poison, of serpents, of forests, of things buried in enchanted seas, rising and falling under the green moonlight of dream-countries beyond the bounds of the world. But all he could think of was that he must hide it away in the dark, when it ought to be lying on Cecilia’s bosom.
He replaced it in its box, shutting the lid, and went to the writing-table behind him to close the drawer; as he turned back quickly, his coat-tail swept the whole thing off the polished mahogany, and sent it spinning into the darkness. He saw the lid open as it went and the chain flash into a corner of the room, like a snake with glittering eyes. He sprang after it, and brought it back to the light to find it unhurt, then went to recover the box. This was not easy to do, for the lid had rolled under one piece of furniture and the lower part under another; but, with the help of a stick, he raked both out of the shadows, and carried them, one in either hand, to examine them under the candle. It struck him that, for an object of its size, the lower half was curiously heavy, and he weighed it up and down, considering it. As he did so, it rattled, showing that the fall must have loosened something in its construction. It was a deep box, and its oval shape did not give the idea that it had been originally made to hold the chain he had found in it. It was lined with silk which had faded to a nondescript colour, and he guessed, from the presence of a tiny knob which he could feel under the thin stuff, that it had a false bottom and that the protuberance was the spring which opened it. This had either got out of repair from long disuse, or else its leap across the floor had injured it, for, press as he might, sideways or downwards, he could produce no effect. He turned the box upside down, and the false bottom fell out, broken, upon the table, exposing a miniature which fitted closely into the real one behind it.
It was the carefully-executed likeness of a young man, whose face set some fugitive note of association vibrating in him, and made him pause as he looked, while he mentally reviewed the various ancestors on his walls. The portrait had been taken full face, which prevented the actual outline of the features from being revealed, but it was the expression which puzzled Gilbert by its familiarity. The character of the eyebrows, drooping at the outer corner of the eyes, gave a certain look of petulance that had nothing transient and was evidently natural to the face. He had seen something like it quite lately, though whether on a human countenance or a painted one, he could not tell. The young man’s dress was of a fashion which had long died out. Under the glass was a lock of hair, tied with a twist of gold thread and not unlike his own in colour, and the gold rim which formed the frame was engraved with letters so fine as to be almost illegible. He tried to take out the miniature, but he could not do so, for it was fixed firmly into the bottom of the box, with the evident purpose of making its concealment certain. He drew the light close. The sentence running round the band was ‘Addio, anima mia,’ and, in a circle just below the hair, was engraved in a smaller size these words: ‘To C. L. from R. F., 1765.’