Volume Iii Part 10 (1/2)
”Well, I don't wish to use an offensive phrase. You will write to oblige me. It has been put off long enough.”
”Why should I oblige you?” said Castalia, looking up at him with sunken eyes. She looked so ill and haggard, as to arrest Algernon's attention--not too lavishly bestowed on her in general.
”Ca.s.sy,” said he, ”I am afraid you are not well!”
The tears came into her eyes. She turned her head away. ”Do you really care whether I am ill or well?” she asked.
”Do I really care? What a question! Of course I care. Are you suffering?”
”N--no; not now. I believe I should not feel any suffering if you only loved me, Ancram.”
”Castalia! How can you be so absurd?”
He rose from his seat beside her, and walked impatiently up and down the room. Nothing irritated him so much as to be called on for sentiment or tenderness.
”There!” she exclaimed, with a little despondent gesture of the head, ”you were speaking and looking kindly, and I have driven you away! I wish I was dead.”
Algernon stopped in his walk, and cast a singular look at his wife. Then after a moment he said, in his usual light manner, ”My dear Ca.s.sy, you are low and nervous. It really is not good for you to mope by yourself as you do. Come, rouse yourself to write this letter to my lord, then after dinner you can have the fly to drive to my mother's. She complains that she sees you very seldom.”
”Will you come too, Ancram?”
”I----well, yes; if it is possible, I will come too.”
”I think,” said Castalia, putting her hands on his shoulders, and gazing wistfully into his face, ”that if you and I could go away to some quiet strange place--far away from all these odious people--across the seas somewhere--I think we might be happy even now.”
”Upon my honour, there's nothing I should like so much as to get away across the seas! And you might as well hint to my lord, in the course of your letter, that I should be very well contented with a berth in the Colonies. A good climate, of course! One wouldn't care to be s.h.i.+pped off to Sierra Leone!”
”I will write that to Uncle Val, willingly. But--don't ask me to beg money of him again.”
Algernon made a rapid calculation in his mind, and answered without appreciable pause, ”Well, Ca.s.sy, it shall be as you will. But as to begging----that, I think, is scarcely the word between us and Lord Seely.”
”I'll run upstairs and bathe my eyes, and I shall still have time to write before dinner,” said Castalia, and left the room.
When he was alone, Algernon opened the writing-table drawer, and glanced at the papers in it. Castalia's hurried manner of concealing them had suggested to his mind the suspicion that she might have been writing secretly to her uncle. He found no letter addressed to Lord Seely, but he did find an unfinished fragment of writing addressed to himself. It consisted of a few incoherent phrases of despondency and reproach--the expression of confidence betrayed and affection unrequited. There was a word or two in it about the writer's weariness of life and desire to quit it.
Castalia had written many such fragments of late; sometimes as a mere outlet for suppressed feeling, sometimes under the impression that she really could not long support an existence uncheered by sympathy or counsel, embittered by jealousy, and chilled by neglect. She had written such fragments, and then torn them up in many a lonely hour, but she had never thought of complaining of Algernon to Lord Seely. She would complain of him to no human being. But all Algernon's insight into his wife's character did not enable him to feel sure of this. Indeed, he had often said to himself that no rational being could be expected to follow the vagaries of Castalia's sickly fancies and impracticable temper. He would not have been surprised to find her pouring out a long string of lamentations about her lot to Lord Seely. He was not much surprised at what he did find her to have written, although the state of feeling it displayed seemed to him as unreasonable and unaccountable as ever. He gave himself no account of the motive which made him take the fragment of writing, fold it, and place it carefully inside a little pocket-book which he carried.
”I wonder,” he thought to himself, ”if Castalia is likely to die!”
CHAPTER IX.
The letter to Lord Seely was duly written, and this time in Castalia's own words. Algernon refused to a.s.sist her in the composition of it, saying, in answer to her appeals, ”No, no, Ca.s.sy; I shall make no suggestion whatsoever. I don't choose to expose myself to any more grandiloquence from your uncle about letters being 'written by your hand, but not dictated by your head.' I wonder at my lord talking such high-flown stuff. But pomposity is his master weakness.”
Castalia's letter was as follows:
”Whitford, November 23rd.
”DEAR UNCLE VAL,--I am sure you will understand that I was very much surprised and hurt at the tone of your last letter to Ancram. Of course, if you have not the money to help us with, you cannot lend it. And I don't complain of that. But I was vexed at the way you wrote to Ancram. You won't think me ungrateful to you. I know how good you have always been to me, and I am fonder of you than of anybody in the world except Ancram. But n.o.body can be unkind to him without hurting me, and I shall always resent any slight to him. But I am writing now to ask you something that 'I wish for very much myself;' it is quite my own desire. I am not at all happy in this place. And I want you to get Ancram a berth somewhere in the Colonies, quite away. It is no use changing from one town in England to another. What we want is to get 'far away,' and put the seas between us and all the odious people here. I am sure you might get us something if you would try. I a.s.sure you Ancram is perfectly wasted in this hole. Any stupid grocer or tallow-chandler could do what he has to do. Do, dear Uncle Val, try to help us in this. Indeed I shall never be happy in Whitford.--Your affectionate niece,
”C. ERRINGTON.