Speid’s thoughts were full of Cecilia and Crauford Fordyce. He had seen the latter a couple of times—for it was some weeks since he had arrived to visit his uncle—and he had not cared for him. Once he had overtaken him on the road, and they had walked a few miles together. He had struck him as stupid, and possibly, coarse-fibred. He only realized, as he stood twirling the tassel of the blind, how important his occasional meetings with Cecilia had become to him, how much she was in his thoughts, how her words, her ways, her movements, her voice, were interwoven with every fancy he had. He had been a dullard, he told himself, stupid and coarse-fibred as Fordyce. He had been obliged to wait until jealousy, like a flash of lightning, should show him that which lay round his feet. Fool, idiot, and thrice idiot that he was to have been near to such a transcendent creature, and yet ignorant of the truth! Though her charm had thrilled him through and through, it was only here and now that the chance words of a vulgar woman had revealed that she was indispensable to him.
Though self-conscious, he was not conceited, and he sighed as he reflected that he could give her nothing which Fordyce could not also offer. From the little he had heard, he fancied him to be a richer man than himself. Cecilia did not strike him as a person who, if her heart were engaged, would take count of the difference. But what chance had he more than another of engaging her heart? Fordyce was not handsome, certainly, but then, neither was he ill-looking. Gilbert glanced across at a mirror which hung in the alcove of the window, and saw in it a rather sinister young man with a scarred face. He was not attractive, either, he thought. Well, he had learned something.
‘Mr. Speid, will you pour out the wine?’
Miss Hersey’s voice was all ceremony. Not for the world would she have called him Gilbert at such a moment.
He went forward to the little tray and did as she bid him.
[CHAPTER IX
ON FOOT AND ON WHEELS]
THE yellow cabriolet stood at the entrance to the close. The iron-gray mare, though no longer in her first youth, abhorred delay, and was tossing her head and moving restlessly, to the great annoyance of the very small English groom who stood a yard in front of her nose, and whose remonstrances were completely lost on her. Now and then she would fidget with her forefeet, spoiling the ‘Assyrian stride’ which had added pounds to her price and made her an object of open-mouthed amazement to the youth of the Kaims gutter.
A crowd of little boys were collected on the pavement; for the company which emerged from the Miss Robertsons’ house on Sundays was as good as a peep-show to them, and the laird of Whanland was, to their minds, the most choice flower of fashion and chivalry which this weekly entertainment could offer. Not that that fact exempted him from their criticism—no fact yet in existence could protect any person from the tongue of the Scotch street-boy—and the groom, who had been exposed to their comment for nearly twenty minutes, was beginning, between the mare and the audience, to come to the end of his temper.
‘Did ever ye see sic a wee, wee mannie?’ exclaimed one of the older boys, pointing at him.