Part 25 (1/2)

TWO WOMEN

The travellers came home the first week of June. During the weeks that had come and gone since Easter they had wandered about as the fancy took them. Rome, Florence, Genoa, Venice. They followed a path of wonders; but, somewhat to her father's dismay, Nelly did not prove the pa.s.sionate pilgrim he had expected. She looked on listlessly at the wonder-world.

Now that her first exaltation had died away it did not seem so simple a matter to make others happy. There was no royal road, she discovered, to the happiness of others any more than to her own.

Her father said to himself that Nell would be all right as soon as the wedding was over. He had not come to the point of thinking yet that marriage with Robin Drummond was not the way the Finger of G.o.d had pointed out to him. It was impossible not to notice Nelly's listless step and heavy eyes. The Dowager put down these things to ordinary delicacy, something the girl would outgrow.

”She wants a husband's care,” she said. ”To be sure, my dear Denis, you have done your best for her. But what, after all, could you know about girls?”

”As much as Robin Drummond, ma'am,” the General said, with a growl; and was not placated by the Dowager's tolerant smile.

He was at once glad and sorry when the weeks were over. He dreaded, for one thing, going back to London where Nelly might hear news of G.o.dfrey Langrishe. To be sure, he had acted entirely for her happiness, yet he had an idea that Nell might be angry with him for keeping things from her if she found out that Langrishe's regiment was engaged in the deadly frontier war. He had been so used to being perfectly frank with her that his reservation galled him.

He had studied with attentiveness the columns of such papers as had come his way, dreading to find Langrishe's name among the casualties.

Hitherto it had not occurred, and for that he was deeply grateful. If there had been news he must have betrayed it to Nelly by his eyes and his voice.

”I wish we could have stayed longer,” she said to him on the eve of their departure from Italy.

”And I, Nell.”

”Oh,” she looked at him in wonder. ”I thought you were keen to be gone.”

”Is it likely?” he asked with playful tenderness, ”that I should be anxious to shorten the time in which you are mine and not Robin Drummond's?”

They were alone, and she turned and put her head on his shoulder.

”I shall always be yours,” she said. ”And I think marriage and giving in marriage a weariness of the spirit.”

”Not really, Nell?” The General looked at her golden head in alarm, but already she was reproaching herself.

”Never mind, dear papa,” she said. ”I didn't altogether mean it. Poor, kind Robin! What a very ungrateful girl I am to you all!”

As soon as they got back the Dowager engaged her in a whirl of shops and dressmakers, and for that the General was grateful. He resorted to man[oe]uvres in those days to keep the newspapers out of Nelly's way that revealed to himself hitherto unsuspected depths of cunning. He opened the papers with a tremor. The orange and green and pink bills of the evening newspapers stuck up where Nelly could see them, laid on the pavement almost under her feet, brought his heart into his mouth. If they could only tide over the dangerous time, and Nelly be married and gone off on her leisurely honeymoon! Langrishe might almost fade out of her mind, become at least a gentle memory, before anything could happen to him: or the deadly little dragging war might be over and Langrishe have carried out a whole skin.

It was the height of the season and Nelly had her social engagements as well as the preparations for her wedding. As often as was possible Robin Drummond put in an appearance, but the House was sitting and much of his time was taken up. He looked rather more hatchet-faced than of old.

Once, sitting in the Strangers' Gallery of the House, the General heard someone say as Robin was about to speak: ”Who is that careworn-looking young man?” Careworn, indeed! The General fumed and fretted over it, the more because it fell in with a certain secret thought he had had once or twice. Robin had always been somewhat too much of an old head on young shoulders to please his uncle. To be sure, he had fed on Blue Books and slept on statistics, yet his engagement to a lovely girl like Nelly ought to have made him look happier. It was indecent in the circ.u.mstances, that's what it was, that anybody, with the remotest justification for the epithet, could call him careworn.

Once Robin on an afternoon when the House was not sitting called for his cousin and carried her off in a hansom without saying where he was taking her to. That was something of which the General heartily approved. If Robin had done it oftener his opinion of him would have gone up immensely. He rubbed his hands while he asked the Dowager what Mrs. Grundy would say to such doings. ”Supposing they made a runaway match of it, ma'am, where should we be?” he asked cheerfully. To which the Dowager replied that Robin would never think of anything so silly.

Why should he, when the wedding was fixed for the twenty-third and everything ordered, even the bridesmaids' dresses and the wedding-cake?

”Perhaps for that reason,” replied the General. But this was a dark saying to the Dowager.

The visit that afternoon was to Mary Gray. Even Nelly had heard of the book which Sir Michael Auberon had praised so highly, which the newspapers had declared to be more interesting than any novel. She had roused herself to be interested in the visit, to talk, to ask questions, to look about her, as they drove into the east, instead of gazing inwards with that introspective glance which had given her eyes of late the beauty of mystery, making them larger and darker than they had been in the old days.

She was exquisitely dressed, in a long cloak of cream lace over an Indian muslin frock, and an airy hat of chiffon and feathers. She had put on her best for her outing with Robin, her visit to Robin's friend.

It was one of the sweet things she was always doing, with an intention in her own mind to make up for some lack or other which certainly her lover had not felt. When she alighted in the busy street people stared as though they had seen a white bird of Paradise; and coming into Mary Gray's room with a basket of roses in her hand she looked like a bride.

Now, at least, she wore the pilgrim air. She looked curiously about the unlikely place which housed the wonderful woman as she set down her roses, then back at Mary herself. Mary had come to meet her with outstretched hands. Her bright look at Robin Drummond was full of sympathetic admiration, of felicitation. She kissed Nelly warmly. She was not an effusive person, and nothing had been further from her thoughts than kissing, but her heart went out at once to this charming girl.

”_How_ good of you to come to see me!” she said, pressing Nelly's hands in hers. ”Into the east, too! And you must be so busy just now.”