The Tenants of Malory Volume II Part 12

"No, not rash. I've been very miserable; _so_ miserable, that the worst certainty which this visit might bring upon me would be almost a relief compared with the intolerable suspense I have lived in; therefore, you see, it really is not rash."

"I'm very bad at an argument," persisted the old lady; "but it _is_ rash, and _very_ rash. You can't conceive," and here she lowered her voice, "the state of exasperation in which he is."

"He," of course, could only mean Sir Booth Fanshawe; and Cleve answered,--

"I a.s.sure you, I can't blame him. I don't wonder. I think a great deal has been very wantonly done to aggravate his misfortunes; but surely, he can't fancy that I could sympathise with any such proceedings, or feel anything but horror and disgust. Surely, _you_ would not allow him to connect me, however slightly? I _know_ you would not."

"My dear Mr. Verney, you don't know Booth Fanshawe, or rather, you do, I believe, know him a great deal too well, to fancy that I could venture to speak to him upon the subject. _That_, I a.s.sure you, is quite out of the question; and I may as well tell you frankly, if he were at home, I mean _here_, I should have begged you at once, inhospitable as it might seem, to leave this place, and trust to time and to letters, but _here_ I would not have allowed you to linger."

"He's away from home, then!" exclaimed Cleve.

"Yes; but he'll be back to-night at ten o'clock."

"At ten o'clock," repeated Cleve, and the young man thought what a treasure of minutes there was in the interval. "And Miss Fanshawe--Margaret--she's quite well?"

"Yes, she's quite well," answered kind Miss Sheckleton, looking in his earnest eyes, and thinking that he looked a little thin and pale. "She's quite well, and, I hope, _you_ have been."

"Oh, yes," answered the young man, "as well as a man with a good many troubles can be. In fact, I may tell _you_, I've been very unhappy. I was thinking of writing to Sir Booth."

"_Don't_," implored Miss Sheckleton, looking quite wildly into his eyes, and with her hand upon his arm, as if to arrest the writing of that letter, "you have no notion how he feels. I a.s.sure you, an allusion--the slightest thing is quite enough to set him in a blaze. The other day, for instance, I did not know what it was, till I took up the paper he had been reading, and I found there something about the Verney peerage, and proof that Arthur Verney was dead, and your uncle to get it; and really I can't wonder--some people seem so unaccountably fortunate, and others, everything goes wrong with--even _I_ felt vexed when I read it, though, of course, any good fortune happening to _you_, I should be very glad of. But he did not see any of us till next day--even Macklin."

"Yes, it is very true," said Cleve, "my uncle _is_ dead, and we shall prove it, that is, my uncle Kiffyn will. But you are quite right to distinguish as you do. It involves nothing for me. Since it has come so near, I have lost all faith in it's ever reaching me. I have, I can't call it a conviction, but a _superst.i.tion_, that it never will. I must build my own fortunes from their foundations, with my own hand. There is but one success on earth that can make me very proud and very happy. Do you think, that having come all this way, in that hope, on that one chance, that Margaret will see me?"

"I wish you had written to me before coming," said Anne Sheckleton, after a little pause. "I should have liked to find out first, all I could, from herself; she is so odd. I've often told you that she _is_ odd. I think it would have been wiser to write to me before coming over, and I should have talked to her,--that is, of course, if she had allowed me,--for I can't in the least say that she would even hear me on the subject."

"Well," said Cleve, with a sigh, "I have come--I am here--and go I cannot without seeing her--I cannot--and you, I think, are too kind to wish that I should. Yes, Miss Sheckleton, you have been my true friend throughout this--what shall I call it?--wild and terrible dream--for I cannot believe it real--I wonder at it myself--I ought to wish I had never seen her--but I cannot--and I think on the result of this visit depends the whole course of my life. You'll not see me long, I think, in the House of Commons, nor in England; but I'll tell you more by-and-by."

The sun had gone down now. A red and melancholy glow, rising from piles of western cloud, melted gradually eastward into the deep blue of night in which the stars were already glimmering.

Along one of the broad avenues cut through the forest that debouches upon the court-yard of the quaint old chteau they were now walking, and, raising his eyes, he saw Margaret approaching from the antique house.

CHAPTER XI.

SHE COMES AND SPEAKS.

"SHE is coming, Mr. Verney," said Miss Sheckleton, speaking low and quietly; but her voice sounded a little strangely, and I think the good-natured spinster was agitated.

Cleve, walking by her side, made no answer. He saw Margaret approach, and while she was yet a good way off, suddenly stop. She had not seen them there before. There seemed no indecision. It was simply that she was startled, and stood still.

"Pray, Miss Sheckleton, do you go on alone. _Entreat_ her not to refuse me a few minutes," said he.

"I will--she shall--I will, indeed, Mr. Verney," said Miss Sheckleton, very much fidgetted. "But you had better remain where we were, just now; I will return to you, and--there are some French servants at the house--will you think me very strange--unkind, I am sure, you will _not_--if I say it is only common prudence that you should not be seen at the house? You understand why I say so."

"Certainly. I shall do whatever you think best," he answered. They had arrested their walk, as Margaret had done, during this little parley.

Perhaps she was uncertain whether her approach had been observed. The sun had gone down by this time, and the twilight had begun to make distant objects a little indistinct.

But there was no time for manoeuvring here, for Miss Fanshawe resumed her walk, and her cousin, Anne Sheckleton, advanced alone to meet her.

"Margaret, dear, a friend has unexpectedly arrived," began Miss Sheckleton.

"And gone, perhaps," answered Margaret Fanshawe, in one of her moods.

"_Better_ gone--come, darling, let us turn, and go towards home--it is growing so dark."

And with these words, taking Miss Sheckleton's hand in hers, she turned towards the house, not choosing to see the friend whom that elderly lady had so eagerly indicated.

Strangely did Cleve Verney feel. That beautiful, cruel girl!--what could she mean?--how could she treat him so? Is there not, in strange countries, where people meet, a kindlier impulse than elsewhere?--and here--could anything be more stony and utterly cruel? The same wonderful _Cenci_--the same low, sweet voice--the same laugh, even--just for a moment heard--but now--how unspeakably cruel! He could see that Miss Sheckleton was talking earnestly to her, as they walked slowly away. It all seemed like a dream. The formal old wood--the grey chteau in the background, rising, with its round turrets, and conical tops, and steep roofs against the rose-tinted sky of evening; and in the foreground--not two score steps away--those figures--that girl to whom so lately he was so near being all the world--to whom, it now appeared, he was absolutely nothing--oh! that he had never heard, in Shakspeare's phrase, that mermaid voice!

His pride was wounded. With a yearning that amounted to agony, he watched their receding steps. Follow them he would not. He leaned against the tree by which Miss Sheckleton had left him, and half resolved to quit that melancholy scene of his worst disaster without another look or word--with only the regrets of all a life.

When Miss Sheckleton had reached Margaret, before the young lady spoke, she saw, by her unusual paleness and by something at once of pain and anger in her face, that she had seen Cleve Verney.

"Well, Margaret, if you _will_ go, you _will_; but, before you make it irreparable, you must, at least, think."

"Think of what?" said Margaret, a little disdainfully.

"Think that he has come all this way for nothing but the chance of seeing you; of perhaps saying a few words to set himself right."

"If he wished to speak to me, he might have said so," she answered. "Not that I see any reason to change my mind on that point, or any good that can come, possibly, or for ever, if he could talk and I listen for so long."

"Well, but you can't doubt what he has come for," said Miss Sheckleton.

"I don't doubt, because I don't mean to think about it," said the young lady, looking fiercely up toward the gilded weather vanes that glimmered on the grey pinnacles of the chteau.

"Yes, but it _is_ not a matter of doubt, or of thinking, but of fact, for he _did_ say so," pleaded Miss Sheckleton.

"I wish we were in Italy, or some out-of-the-way part of Spain," said the handsome girl, in the same vein, and walking still onward; "I always said this was too near England, too much in the current."

"No, dear, it is a quiet place," said good Anne Sheckleton.

"No, cousin Anne, it is the most _un_quiet place in all the world,"

answered the girl, in a wild, low tone, as she walked on.

"And he wants to speak to you; he entreats a few words, a very few."

"You _know_ I ought not," said she.

"I know you _ought_, my dear; you'll be sorry for it, all your days, Margaret, if you don't," replied Anne Sheckleton.

"Come home, dear, come home, darling," said the girl, peremptorily, but sadly.

"I say, Margaret, if you let him go without speaking to him, you will regret it all your days."

"You have no right to talk this way, cousin Anne; I am unhappy enough as it is. Let us go on," she said.

"If you send him away, as I say, it is all over between you."