CHAPTER XLVIII

OF THE TRIAL AWAITING THE EARL OF ROMFREY

Cecilia softly dropped her father's arm, and went into the house. The

exceeding pallor of Beauchamp's face haunted her in her room. She heard

the controversy proceeding below, and an exclamation of Blackburn

Tuckham's: 'Immorality of meat-eating? What nonsense are they up to now?'

Beauchamp was inaudible, save in a word or two. As usual, he was the

solitary minority.

But how mournfully changed he was! She had not noticed it, agitated by

her own emotions as she had been, and at one time three parts frozen. He

was the ghost of the Nevil Beauchamp who had sprung on the deck of the

Esperanza out of Lieutenant Wilmore's boat, that sunny breezy day which

was the bright first chapter of her new life--of her late life, as it

seemed to her now, for she was dead to it, and another creature, the

coldest of the women of earth. She felt sensibly cold, coveted warmth,

flung a shawl on her shoulders, and sat in a corner of her room, hidden

and shivering beside the open window, till long after the gentlemen had

ceased to speak.

How much he must have suffered of late! The room she had looked to as a

refuge from Nevil was now her stronghold against the man whom she had

incredibly accepted. She remained there, the victim of a heart malady,

under the term of headache. Feeling entrapped, she considered that she

must have been encircled and betrayed. She looked back on herself as a

giddy figure falling into a pit: and in the pit she lay.

And how vile to have suspected of unfaithfulness and sordidness the

generous and stedfast man of earth! He never abandoned a common

friendship. His love of his country was love still, whatever the form it

had taken. His childlike reliance on effort and outspeaking, for which

men laughed at him, was beautiful.

Where am I? she cried amid her melting images of him, all dominated by

his wan features. She was bound fast, imprisoned and a slave. Even Mr.

Austin had conspired against him: for only she read Nevil justly. His

defence of Dr. Shrapnel filled her with an envy that no longer maligned

the object of it, but was humble, and like the desire of the sick to

creep into sunshine.

The only worthy thing she could think of doing was (it must be mentioned

for a revelation of her fallen state, and, moreover, she was not lusty of

health at the moment) to abjure meat. The body loathed it, and

consequently the mind of the invalided lady shrank away in horror of the

bleeding joints, and the increasingly fierce scramble of Christian souls

for the dismembered animals: she saw the innocent pasturing beasts, she

saw the act of slaughter. She had actually sweeping before her sight a

spectacle of the ludicrous-terrific, in the shape of an entire community

pursuing countless herds of poor scampering animal life for blood: she,

meanwhile, with Nevil and Dr. Shrapnel, stood apart contemning. For whoso

would not partake of flesh in this kingdom of roast beef must be of the

sparse number of Nevil's execrated minority in politics.

The example will show that she touched the borders of delirium.

Physically, the doctor pronounces her bilious. She was in earnest so far

as to send down to the library for medical books, and books upon diet.

These, however, did not plead for the beasts. They treated the subject

without question of man's taking that which he has conquered. Poets and

philosophers did the same. Again she beheld Nevil Beauchamp solitary in

the adverse rank to the world;--to his countrymen especially. But that it

was no material cause which had wasted his cheeks and lined his forehead,

she was sure: and to starve with him, to embark with him in his little

boat on the seas he whipped to frenzy, would have been a dream of bliss,

had she dared to contemplate herself in a dream as his companion.

It was not to be thought of.

No: but this was, and to be thought of seriously: Cecilia had said to

herself for consolation that Beauchamp was no spiritual guide; he had her

heart within her to plead for him, and the reflection came to her, like a

bubble up from the heart, that most of our spiritual guides neglect the

root to trim the flower: and thence, turning sharply on herself, she

obtained a sudden view of her allurement and her sin in worshipping

herself, and recognized that the aim at an ideal life closely approaches,

or easily inclines, to self-worship; to which the lady was woman and

artist enough to have had no objection, but that therein visibly she

discerned the retributive vain longings, in the guise of high individual

superiority and distinction, that had thwarted her with Nevil Beauchamp,

never permitting her to love single-mindedly or whole-heartedly, but

always in reclaiming her rights and sighing for the loss of her ideal;

adoring her own image, in fact, when she pretended to cherish, and regret

that she could not sufficiently cherish, the finer elements of nature.

What was this ideal she had complained of losing? It was a broken mirror:

she could think of it in no other form.

Dr. Shrapnel's 'Ego-Ego' yelped and gave chase to her through the pure

beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets. It hunted all

the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their heads-her

favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.

The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her

bilious. He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the

parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a

consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel. 'The very family to

require strong nourishment,' said the doctor.

Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book

and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of

labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world's weight.

Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp's track to experience that.

She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.

Homoeopathy, hydropathy,--the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.

Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,

promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have

been so deferential to a diseased mind. Beyond calling her by her

Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of

their new relations together. He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount

Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one deposited

on a mudbank after buffeting the waves. She learnt that her father had

seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her personal

dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal of her

feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her where she

now lay helpless, almost inanimate.

She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a

marriage-day. It told her that she lived and was moving. The fear of

death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than Cecilia's

shunning of such a day. The naming of it numbed her blood like a

snakebite. Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and, happily for

Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels, were few and

short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him to

alarm her.

Under her air of calm abstraction she watched him rigorously for some

sign of his ownership that should tempt her to revolt from her pledge, or

at least dream of breaking loose: the dream would have sufficed. He was

never intrusive, never pressing. He did not vex, because he absolutely

trusted to the noble loyalty which made her admit to herself that she

belonged irrevocably to him, while her thoughts were upon Beauchamp. With

a respectful gravity he submitted to her perusal a collection of

treatises on diet, classed pro and con., and paged and pencil-marked to

simplify her study of the question. They sketched in company; she played

music to him, he read poetry to her, and read it well. He seemed to feel

the beauty of it sensitively, as she did critically. In other days the

positions had been reversed. He invariably talked of Beauchamp with

kindness, deploring only that he should be squandering his money on

workmen's halls and other hazy projects down in Bevisham.

'Lydiard tells me he has a very sound idea of the value of money, and has

actually made money by cattle breeding; but he has flung ten thousand

pounds on a single building outside the town, and he'll have to endow it

to support it--a Club to educate Radicals. The fact is, he wants to jam

the business of two or three centuries into a life-time. These men of

their so-called progress are like the majority of religious minds: they

can't believe without seeing and touching. That is to say, they don't

believe in the abstract at all, but they go to work blindly by agitating,

and proselytizing, and persecuting to get together a mass they can

believe in. You see it in their way of arguing; it's half done with the

fist. Lydiard tells me he left him last in a horrible despondency about

progress. Ha! ha! Beauchamp's no Radical. He hasn't forgiven the Countess

of Romfrey for marrying above her rank. He may be a bit of a Republican:

but really in this country Republicans are fighting with the shadow of an

old hat and a cockhorse. I beg to state that I have a reverence for

constituted authority: I speak of what those fellows are contending

with.'

'Right,' said Colonel Halkett. 'But "the shadow of an old hat and a

cockhorse": what does that mean?'

'That's what our Republicans are hitting at, sir.'

'Ah! so; yes,' quoth the colonel. 'And I say this to Nevil Beauchamp,

that what we've grown up well with, powerfully with, it's base

ingratitude and dangerous folly to throw over.'

He blamed Beauchamp for ingratitude to the countess, who had, he affirmed

of his own knowledge, married Lord Romfrey to protect Beauchamp's

interests.

A curious comment on this allegation was furnished by the announcement of

the earl's expectations of a son and heir. The earl wrote to Colonel

Halkett from Romfrey Castle inviting him to come and spend some time

there.

'Now, that's brave news!' the colonel exclaimed.

He proposed a cruise round by the Cornish coast to the Severn, and so to

Romfrey Castle, to squeeze the old lord's hand and congratulate him with

all his heart. Cecilia was glad to acquiesce, for an expedition of any

description was a lull in the storm that hummed about her ears in the

peace of home, where her father would perpetually speak of the day to be

fixed. Sailing the sea on a cruise was like the gazing at wonderful

colours of a Western sky: an oblivion of earthly dates and obligations.

What mattered it that there were gales in August? She loved the sea, and

the stinging salt spray, and circling gull and plunging gannet, the sun

on the waves, and the torn cloud. The revelling libertine open sea wedded

her to Beauchamp in that veiled cold spiritual manner she could muse on

as a circumstance out of her life.

Fair companies of racing yachts were left behind. The gales of August

mattered frightfully to poor Blackburn Tuckham, who was to be dropped at

a town in South Wales, and descended greenish to his cabin as soon as

they had crashed on the first wall-waves of the chalk-race, a throw

beyond the peaked cliffs edged with cormorants, and were really tasting

sea. Cecilia reclined on deck, wrapped in shawl and waterproof. As the

Alpine climber claims the upper air, she had the wild sea to herself

through her love of it; quite to herself. It was delicious to look round

and ahead, and the perturbation was just enough to preserve her from

thoughts too deep inward in a scene where the ghost of Nevil was abroad.

The hard dry gale increased. Her father, stretched beside her, drew her

attention to a small cutter under double-reefed main-sail and small jib

on the Esperanza's weather bow--a gallant boat carefully handled. She

watched it with some anxiety, but the Esperanza was bound for a Devon

bay, and bore away from the black Dorsetshire headland, leaving the

little cutter to run into haven if she pleased. The passing her was no

event.--In a representation of the common events befalling us in these

times, upon an appreciation of which this history depends, one turns at

whiles a languishing glance toward the vast potential mood, pluperfect

tense. For Nevil Beauchamp was on board the cutter, steering her, with

Dr. Shrapnel and Lydiard in the well, and if an accident had happened to

cutter or schooner, what else might not have happened? Cecilia gathered

it from Mrs. Wardour-Devereux, whom, to her surprise and pleasure, she

found at Romfrey Castle. Her friend Louise received a letter from Mr.

Lydiard, containing a literary amateur seaman's log of a cruise of a

fifteen-ton cutter in a gale, and a pure literary sketch of Beauchamp

standing drenched at the helm from five in the morning up to nine at

night, munching a biscuit for nourishment. The beautiful widow prepared

the way for what was very soon to be publicly known concerning herself by

reading out this passage of her correspondent's letter in the breakfast

room.

'Yes, the fellow's a sailor!' said Lord Romfrey.

The countess rose from her chair and walked out.

'Now, was that abuse of the fellow?' the old lord asked Colonel Halkett.

'I said he was a sailor, I said nothing else. He is a sailor, and he's

fit for nothing else, and no ship will he get unless he bends his neck

never 's nearer it.'

He hesitated a moment, and went after his wife.

Cecilia sat with the countess, in the afternoon, at a window overlooking

the swelling woods of Romfrey. She praised the loveliness of the view.

'It is fire to me,' said Rosamund.

Cecilia looked at her, startled. Rosamund said no more.

She was an excellent hostess, nevertheless, unpretending and simple in

company; and only when it chanced that Beauchamp's name was mentioned did

she cast that quick supplicating nervous glance at the earl, with a

shadow of an elevation of her shoulders, as if in apprehension of mordant

pain.

We will make no mystery about it. I would I could. Those happy tales of

mystery are as much my envy as the popular narratives of the deeds of

bread and cheese people, for they both create a tide-way in the attentive

mind; the mysterious pricking our credulous flesh to creep, the familiar

urging our obese imagination to constitutional exercise. And oh, the

refreshment there is in dealing with characters either contemptibly

beneath us or supernaturally above! My way is like a Rhone island in the

summer drought, stony, unattractive and difficult between the two

forceful streams of the unreal and the over-real, which delight

mankind--honour to the conjurors! My people conquer nothing, win none;

they are actual, yet uncommon. It is the clock-work of the brain that

they are directed to set in motion, and--poor troop of actors to vacant

benches!--the conscience residing in thoughtfulness which they would

appeal to; and if you are there impervious to them, we are lost: back I

go to my wilderness, where, as you perceive, I have contracted the habit

of listening to my own voice more than is good: The burden of a child in

her bosom had come upon Rosamund with the visage of the Angel of Death

fronting her in her path. She believed that she would die; but like much

that we call belief, there was a kernel of doubt in it, which was lively

when her frame was enlivened, and she then thought of the giving birth to

this unloved child, which was to disinherit the man she loved, in whose

interest solely (so she could presume to think, because it had been her

motive reason) she had married the earl. She had no wish to be a mother;

but that prospect, and the dread attaching to it at her time of life, she

could have submitted to for Lord Romfrey's sake. It struck her like a

scoffer's blow that she, the one woman on earth loving Nevil, should have

become the instrument for dispossessing him. The revulsion of her

feelings enlightened her so far as to suggest, without enabling her to

fathom him, that instead of having cleverly swayed Lord Romfrey, she had

been his dupe, or a blind accomplice; and though she was too humane a

woman to think of punishing him, she had so much to forgive that the

trifles daily and at any instant added to the load, flushed her

resentment, like fresh lights showing new features and gigantic outlines.

Nevil's loss of Cecilia she had anticipated; she had heard of it when she

was lying in physical and mental apathy at Steynham. Lord Romfrey had

repeated to her the nature of his replies to the searching parental

questions of Colonel Halkett, and having foreseen it all, and what was

more, foretold it, she was not aroused from her torpor. Latterly, with

the return of her natural strength, she had shown herself incapable of

hearing her husband speak of Nevil; nor was the earl tardy in taking the

hint to spare the mother of his child allusions that vexed her. Now and

then they occurred perforce. The presence of Cecilia exasperated

Rosamund's peculiar sensitiveness. It required Louise Wardour-Devereux's

apologies and interpretations to account for what appeared to Cecilia

strangely ill-conditioned, if not insane, in Lady Romfrey's behaviour.

The most astonishing thing to hear was, that Lady Romfrey had paid Mrs.

Devereux a visit at her Surrey house unexpectedly one Sunday in the

London season, for the purpose, as it became evident, of meeting Mr.

Blackburn Tuckham: and how she could have known that Mr. Tuckham would be

there, Mrs. Devereux could not tell, for it was, Louise assured Cecilia,

purely by chance that he and Mr. Lydiard were present: but the countess

obtained an interview with him alone, and Mr. Tuckham came from it

declaring it to have been more terrible than any he had ever been called

upon to endure. The object of the countess was to persuade him to

renounce his bride.

Louise replied to the natural inquiry--'Upon what plea?' with a

significant evasiveness. She put her arms round Cecilia's neck: 'I trust

you are not unhappy. You will get no release from him.'

'I am not unhappy,' said Cecilia, musically clear to convince her friend.

She was indeed glad to feel the stout chains of her anchor restraining

her when Lady Romfrey talked of Nevil; they were like the safety of

marriage without the dreaded ceremony, and with solitude to let her weep.

Bound thus to a weaker man than Blackburn Tuckham, though he had been

more warmly esteemed, her fancy would have drifted away over the deeps,

perhaps her cherished loyalty would have drowned in her tears--for Lady

Romfrey tasked it very severely: but he from whom she could hope for no

release, gave her some of the firmness which her nature craved in this

trial.

From saying quietly to her: 'I thought once you loved him,' when alluding

to Nevil, Lady Romfrey passed to mournful exclamations, and by degrees on

to direct entreaties. She related the whole story of Renee in England,

and appeared distressed with a desperate wonderment at Cecilia's mildness

after hearing it. Her hearer would have imagined that she had no moral

sense, if it had not been so perceptible that the poor lady's mind was

distempered on the one subject of Nevil Beauchamp. Cecilia's high

conception of duty, wherein she was a peerless flower of our English

civilization, was incommunicable: she could practise, not explain it. She

bowed to Lady Romfrey's praises of Nevil, suffered her hands to be wrung,

her heart to be touched, all but an avowal of her love of him to be

wrested from her, and not the less did she retain her cold resolution to

marry to please her father and fulfil her pledge. In truth, it was too

late to speak of Renee to her now. It did not beseem Cecilia to remember

that she had ever been a victim of jealousy; and while confessing to many

errors, because she felt them, and gained a necessary strength from

them--in the comfort of the consciousness of pain, for example, which she

sorely needed, that the pain in her own breast might deaden her to

Nevil's jealousy, the meanest of the errors of a lofty soul, yielded no

extract beyond the bare humiliation proper to an acknowledgement that it

had existed: so she discarded the recollection of the passion which had

wrought the mischief. Since we cannot have a peerless flower of

civilization without artificial aid, it may be understood how it was that

Cecilia could extinguish some lights in her mind and kindle others, and

wherefore what it was not natural for her to do, she did. She had,

briefly, a certain control of herself.

Our common readings in the fictitious romances which mark out a plot and

measure their characters to fit into it, had made Rosamund hopeful of the

effect of that story of Renee. A wooden young woman, or a galvanized

(sweet to the writer, either of them, as to the reader--so moveable they

are!) would have seen her business at this point, and have glided melting

to reconciliation and the chamber where romantic fiction ends joyously.

Rosamund had counted on it.

She looked intently at Cecilia. 'He is ruined, wasted, ill, unloved; he

has lost you--I am the cause!' she cried in a convulsion of grief.

'Dear Lady Romfrey!' Cecilia would have consoled her. 'There is nothing

to lead us to suppose that Nevil is unwell, and you are not to blame for

anything: how can you be?'

'I spoke falsely of Dr. Shrapnel; I am the cause. It lies on me! it

pursues me. Let me give to the poor as I may, and feel for the poor, as I

do, to get nearer to Nevil--I cannot have peace! His heart has turned

from me. He despises me. If I had spoken to Lord Romfrey at Steynham, as

he commanded me, you and he--Oh! cowardice: he is right, cowardice is the

chief evil in the world. He is ill; he is desperately ill; he will die.'

'Have you heard he is very ill, Lady Romfrey?'

'No! no!' Rosamund exclaimed; 'it is by not hearing that I know it!'

With the assistance of Louise Devereux, Cecilia gradually awakened to

what was going on in the house. There had been a correspondence between

Miss Denham and the countess. Letters from Bevisham had suddenly ceased.

Presumably the earl had stopped them: and if so it must have been for a

tragic reason.

Cecilia hinted some blame of Lord Romfrey to her father.

He pressed her hand and said: 'You don't know what that man suffers.

Romfrey is fond of Nevil too, but he must guard his wife; and the fact is

Nevil is down with fever. It 's in the papers now; he may be able to

conceal it, and I hope he will. There'll be a crisis, and then he can

tell her good news--a little illness and all right now! Of course,' the

colonel continued buoyantly, 'Nevil will recover; he's a tough wiry young

fellow, but poor Romfrey's fears are natural enough about the countess.

Her mind seems to be haunted by the doctor there--Shrapnel, I mean; and

she's exciteable to a degree that threatens the worst--in case of any

accident in Bevisham.'

'Is it not a kind of cowardice to conceal it?' Cecilia suggested.

'It saves her from fretting,' said the colonel.

'But she is fretting! If Lord Romfrey would confide in her and trust to

her courage, papa, it would be best.'

Colonel Halkett thought that Lord Romfrey was the judge.

Cecilia wished to leave a place where this visible torture of a human

soul was proceeding, and to no purpose. She pointed out to her father, by

a variety of signs, that Lady Romfrey either knew or suspected the state

of affairs in Bevisham, and repeated her remarks upon Nevil's illness.

But Colonel Halkett was restrained from departing by the earl's constant

request to him to stay. Old friendship demanded it of him. He began to

share his daughter's feelings at the sight of Lady Romfrey. She was

outwardly patient and submissive; by nature she was a strong healthy

woman; and she attended to all her husband's prescriptions for the

regulating of her habits, walked with him, lay down for the afternoon's

rest, appeared amused when he laboured to that effect, and did her utmost

to subdue the worm devouring her heart but the hours of the delivery of

the letter-post were fatal to her. Her woeful: 'No letter for me!' was

piteous. When that was heard no longer, her silence and famished gaze

chilled Cecilia. At night Rosamund eyed her husband expressionlessly,

with her head leaning back in her chair, to the sorrow of the ladies

beholding her. Ultimately the contagion of her settled misery took hold

of Cecilia. Colonel Halkett was induced by his daughter and Mrs. Devereux

to endeavour to combat a system that threatened consequences worse than

those it was planned to avert. He by this time was aware of the serious

character of the malady which had prostrated Nevil. Lord Romfrey had

directed his own medical man to go down to Bevisham, and Dr. Gannet's

report of Nevil was grave. The colonel made light of it to his daughter,

after the fashion he condemned in Lord Romfrey, to whom however he spoke

earnestly of the necessity for partially taking his wife into his

confidence to the extent of letting her know that a slight fever was

running its course with Nevil.

'There will be no slight fever in my wife's blood,' said the earl. 'I

stand to weather the cape or run to wreck, and it won't do to be taking

in reefs on a lee-shore. You don't see what frets her, colonel. For years

she has been bent on Nevil's marriage. It's off: but if you catch Cecilia

by the hand and bring her to us--I swear she loves the fellow!--that's

the medicine for my wife. Say: will you do it? Tell Lady Romfrey it shall

be done. We shall stand upright again!'

'I'm afraid that's impossible, Romfrey,' said the colonel.

'Play at it, then! Let her think it. You're helping me treat an invalid.

Colonel! my old friend! You save my house and name if you do that. It's a

hand round a candle in a burst of wind. There's Nevil dragged by a woman

into one of their reeking hovels--so that Miss Denham at Shrapnel's

writes to Lady Romfrey--because the woman's drunken husband voted for him

at the Election, and was kicked out of employment, and fell upon the

gin-bottle, and the brats of the den died starving, and the man sickened

of a fever; and Nevil goes in and sits with him! Out of that tangle of

folly is my house to be struck down? It looks as if the fellow with his

infernal "humanity," were the bad genius of an old nurse's tale. He's a

good fellow, colonel, he means well. This fever will cure him, they say

it sobers like bloodletting. He's a gallant fellow; you know that. He

fought to the skeleton in our last big war. On my soul, I believe he's

good for a husband. Frenchwoman or not, that affair's over. He shall have

Steynham and Holdesbury. Can I say more? Now, colonel, you go in to the

countess. Grasp my hand. Give me that help, and God bless you! You light

up my old days. She's a noble woman: I would not change her against the

best in the land. She has this craze about Nevil. I suppose she'll never

get over it. But there it is: and we must feed her with the spoon.'

Colonel Halkett argued stutteringly with the powerful man: 'It's the

truth she ought to hear, Romfrey; indeed it is, if you 'll believe me. It

's his life she is fearing for. She knows half.'

'She knows positively nothing, colonel. Miss Denham's first letter spoke

of the fellow's having headaches, and staggering. He was out on a cruise,

and saw your schooner pass, and put into some port, and began falling

right and left, and they got him back to Shrapnel's: and here it is--that

if you go to him you'll save him, and if you go to my wife you'll save

her: and there you have it: and I ask my old friend, I beg him to go to

them both.'

'But you can't surely expect me to force my daughter's inclinations, my

dear Romfrey?'

'Cecilia loves the fellow!'

'She is engaged to Mr. Tuckham.'

'I'll see the man Tuckham.'

'Really, my dear lord!'

'Play at it, Halkett, play at it! Tide us over this! Talk to her: hint it

and nod it. We have to round November. I could strangle the world till

that month's past. You'll own,' he added mildly after his thunder, 'I'm

not much of the despot Nevil calls me. She has not a wish I don't supply.

I'm at her beck, and everything that's mine. She's a brave good woman. I

don't complain. I run my chance. But if we lose the child--good night!

Boy or girl!--boy!'

Lord Romfrey flung an arm up. The child of his old age lived for him

already: he gave it all the life he had. This miracle, this young son

springing up on an earth decaying and dark, absorbed him. This reviver of

his ancient line must not be lost. Perish every consideration to avert

it! He was ready to fear, love, or hate terribly, according to the

prospects of his child.

Colonel Halkett was obliged to enter into a consultation, of a shadowy

sort, with his daughter, whose only advice was that they should leave the

castle. The penetrable gloom there, and the growing apprehension

concerning the countess and Nevil, tore her to pieces. Even if she could

have conspired with the earl to hoodwink his wife, her strong sense told

her it would be fruitless, besides base. Father and daughter had to make

the stand against Lord Romfrey. He saw their departure from the castle

gates, and kissed his hand to Cecilia, courteously, without a smile.

'He may well praise the countess, papa,' said Cecilia, while they were

looking back at the castle and the moveless flag that hung in folds by

the mast above it. 'She has given me her promise to avoid questioning him

and to accept his view of her duty. She said to me that if Nevil should

die she . . .'

Cecilia herself broke down, and gave way to sobs in her father's arms.