Part 54 (1/2)
His manner is so earnest, so pleading, that Kate, who scents at least a death in the air, retires full of compa.s.sion for the ”pore gentleman.”
And then another three minutes, that now to the agitated listener appear like forty, drag themselves into the past.
Suspense is growing intolerable, when a well-known step in the hall outside makes his heart beat almost to suffocation. The door is opened slowly, and Mrs. Arlington comes in.
”You have something to say to me?” she asks, curtly, unkindly, standing just inside the door, and betraying an evident determination not to sit down for any consideration upon earth. Her manner is uncompromising and forbidding, but her eyes are very red. There is rich consolation in this discovery.
”I have,” replies Cyril, openly confused now it has come to the point.
”Say it, then. I am here to listen to you. My servant tells me it is something of the deepest importance.”
”So it is. In all the world there is nothing so important to me.
Cecilia,”--coming a little nearer to her,--”it is that I want your forgiveness; I ask your pardon very humbly, and I throw myself upon your mercy. You must forgive me!”
”Forgiveness seems easy to you, who cannot feel,” replies she, haughtily, turning as though to leave the room; but Cyril intercepts her, and places his back against the door.
”I cannot let you go until you are friends with me again,” he says, in deep agitation.
”Friends!”
”Think what I have gone through. _You_ have only suffered for a few minutes, _I_ have suffered for three long days. Think of it. My heart was breaking all the time. I went to London hoping to escape thought, and never shall I forget what I endured in that detestable city. Like a man in a dream I lived, scarcely seeing, or, if seeing, only trying to elude, those I knew. At times----”
”You went to London?”
”Yes, that is how I have been absent for three days; I have hardly slept or eaten since last I saw you.”
Here Cecilia is distinctly conscious of a feeling of satisfaction: next to a man's dying for you the sweetest thing is to hear of a man's starving for you!
”Sometimes,” goes on Cyril, piling up the agony higher and higher, and speaking in his gloomiest tones, ”I thought it would be better if I put an end to it once for all, by blowing out my brains.”
”How dare you speak to me like this?” Cecilia says in a trembling voice: ”it is horrible. You would commit suicide? Am I not unhappy enough, that you must seek to make me more so? Why should you blow your brains out?”
with a shudder.
”Because I could not live without you. Even now,”--reproachfully,--”when I see you looking so coldly upon me, I almost wish I had put myself out of the way for good.”
”Cyril, I forbid you to talk like this.”
”Why? I don't suppose you care whether I am dead or alive.” This artful speech, uttered in a heart-broken tone, does immense execution.
”If you were dead,” begins she, forlornly, and then stops short, because her voice fails her, and two large tears steal silently down her cheeks.
”Would you care?” asks Cyril, going up to her and placing one arm gently round her; being unrepulsed, he gradually strengthens this arm with the other. ”Would you?”
”I hardly know.”
”Darling, don't be cruel. I was wrong, terribly, unpardonably wrong ever to doubt your sweet truth; but when one has stories perpetually dinned into one's ears, one naturally grows jealous of one's shadow, when one loves as I do.”
”And pray, who told you all these stories?”