Vixen. Volume III

In this desperate and for the most part unsuspected condition of mind, Lord Mallow hung upon Lady Mabel's footsteps during the days immediately before the wedding. Roderick was superintending the alterations at Briarwood, which were being carried on upon rather an extravagant scale, to make the mansion worthy of the bride. Lord Mallow was always at hand, in the orchid-houses, carrying scissors and adjusting the hose, in the library, in the gardens, in the boudoir. He was drinking greedily of the sweet poison. This fool's paradise of a few days must end in darkness, desolation, despair – everything dreadful beginning with d; but the paradise was so delicious an abode that although an angel with a flaming sword, in the shape of conscience, was always standing at the gate, Lord Mallow would not be thrust out. He remained; in defiance of conscience, and honour, and all those good sentiments that should have counselled his speedy departure.

CHAPTER VII.

"It might have been."

"They are the most curious pair of lovers I ever saw in my life," said one of the visitors at Ashbourne, a young lady who had been engaged to be married more than once, and might fairly consider herself an authority upon such matters. "One never sees them together."

"They are cousins," replied her companion. "What can you expect from a courtship between cousins? It must be the most humdrum affair possible."

"All courtships are humdrum, unless there is opposition from parents, or something out of the common order to enliven them," said somebody else.

The speakers were a party of young ladies, who were getting through an idle hour after breakfast in the billiard-room.

"Lady Mabel is just the sort of girl no man could be desperately in love with," said another. "She is very pretty, and elegant, and accomplished, and all that sort of thing – but she is so overpoweringly well satisfied with herself that it seems superfluous for anyone to admire her.'

"In spite of that I know of someone in this house who does immensely admire her," asserted the young lady who had spoken first. "Much more than I should approve if I were Mr. Vawdrey."

"I think I know – " began somebody, and then abruptly remarked: "What a too ridiculous stroke! And I really thought I was going to make a cannon."

This sudden change in the current of the talk was due to the appearance of the subject of this friendly disquisition. Lady Mabel had that moment entered, followed by Lord Mallow, not intent on billiards, like the frivolous damsels assembled round the table. There were book-cases all along one side of the billiard-room, containing the surplus books that had overrun the shelves in the library; and Mabel had come to look for a particular volume among these. It was a treatise upon the antiquities of Ireland. Lord Mallow and Lady Mabel had been disputing about the Round Towers.

"Of course you are right," said the Irishman, when she had triumphantly exhibited a page which supported her side of the argument. "What a wonderful memory you have! What a wife you would make for a statesman! You would be worth half-a-dozen secretaries!"

Mabel blushed, and smiled faintly, with lowered eyelids.

"Do you remember that concluding picture in 'My Novel,'" she asked, "where Violante tempts Harley Lestrange from his idle musing over Horace, to toil through blue-books; and, when she is stealing softly from the room, he detains her and bids her copy an extract for him? 'Do you think I would go through this labour,' he says, 'if you were not to halve this success? Halve the labour as well.' I have always envied Violante that moment in her life."

"And who would not envy Harley such a wife as Violante," returned Lord Mallow, "if she was like – the woman I picture her?"

Three hours later Lord Mallow and Lady Mabel met by accident in the garden. It was an afternoon of breathless heat and golden sunlight, the blue ether without a cloud – a day on which the most restless spirit might be content to yield to the drowsiness of the atmosphere, and lie at ease upon the sunburnt grass and bask in the glory of summer. Lord Mallow had never felt so idle, in the whole course of his vigorous young life.

"I don't know what has come to me," he said to himself; "I can't settle to any kind of work; and I don't care a straw for sight-seeing with a pack of nonentities."

A party had gone off in a drag, soon after breakfast, to see some distant ruins; and Lord Mallow had refused to be of that party, though it included some of the prettiest girls at Ashbourne. He had stayed at home, on pretence of writing important letters, but had not, so far, penned a line. "It must be the weather," said Lord Mallow.

An hour or so after luncheon he strolled out into the gardens, having given up all idea of writing those letters, There was a wide lawn, that sloped from the terrace in front of the drawing-room windows, a lawn encircled by a belt of carefully-chosen timber. It was not very old timber, but it was sufficiently umbrageous. There were tulip-trees, and copper-beeches, and Douglas pines, and deodoras. There were shrubs of every kind, and winding paths under the trees, and rustic benches here and there to repose the wearied traveller.

On one of these benches, placed in a delicious spot, shaded by a group of pines, commanding the wide view of valley and distant hill far away towards Ringwood, Lord Mallow found Lady Mabel seated reading. She was looking delightfully cool amidst the sultry heat of the scene, perfectly dressed in soft white muslin, with much adornment of delicate lace and pale-hued ribbon: but she was not looking happy. She was gazing at the open volume on her knee, with fixed and dreamy eyes that saw not the page; and as Lord Mallow came very near, with steps that made no sound on the fallen pine-needles, he saw that there were tears upon her drooping eyelids.

There are moments in every man's life when impulse is stronger than discretion. Lord Mallow gave the reins to impulse now, and seated himself by Lady Mabel's side, and took her hand in his, with an air of sympathy so real that the lady forgot to be offended.

"Forgive me for having surprised your tears," he murmured gently.

"I am very foolish," she said, blushing deeply as she became aware of the hand clasping hers, and suddenly withdrawing her own; "but there are passages of Dante that are too pathetic."

"Oh, it was Dante!" exclaimed Lord Mallow, with a disappointed air.

He looked down at the page on her lap.

"Yes, naturally."

She had been reading about Paolo and Francesca – that one episode, in all the catalogue of sin and sorrow, which melts every heart; a page at which the volume seems to open of its own accord.

Lord Mallow leaned down and read the lines in a low voice, slowly, with considerable feeling; and then he looked softly up at Mabel Ashbourne, and at the landscape lying below them, in all the glow and glory of the summer light, and looked back to the lady, with his hand still on the book.

The strangeness of the situation: they two alone in the garden, unseen, unheard by human eye or ear; the open book between them – a subtle bond of union – hinting at forbidden passion.

"They were deeply to be pitied," said Lord Mallow, meaning the guilty lovers.

"It was very sad," murmured Lady Mabel.

"But they were neither the first nor the last who have found out too late that they were created to be happy in each other's love, and had by an accident missed that supreme chance of happiness," said Lord Mallow, with veiled intention.

Mabel sighed, and took the book from the gentleman's hand, and drew a little farther off on the bench. She was not the kind of young woman to yield tremblingly to the first whisper of an unauthorised love. It was all very well to admire Francesca, upon strictly aesthetic grounds, as the perfection of erring womanhood, beautiful even in her guilt. Francesca had lived so long ago – in days so entirely mediaeval, that one could afford to regard her with indulgent pity. But it was not to be supposed that a modern duke's daughter was going to follow that unfortunate young woman's example, and break plighted vows. Betrothal, in the eyes of so exalted a moralist as Lady Mabel, was a tie but one degree less sacred than marriage.

"Why did you not go to see the ruins?" she asked, resuming her society tone.

"Because I was in a humour in which ruins would have been unutterably odious. Indeed, Lady Mabel, I am just now very much of Macbeth's temper, when he began to be a-weary of the sun."

"Has the result of the session disappointed you?"

"Naturally. When was that ever otherwise? Parliament opens full of promise, like a young king who has just ascended the throne, and everybody is to be made happy; all burdens are to be lightened, the seeds of all good things that have been hidden deep in earth through the slow centuries are to germinate all at once, and blossom, and bear fruit. And the session comes to an end; and, lo! a great many good things have been talked about, and no good thing has been done. That is in the nature of things. No, Lady Mabel, it is not that which makes me unhappy."

He waited for her to ask him what his trouble was, but she kept silence.

"No," he repeated, "it is not that."

Again there was no reply; and he went on awkwardly, like an actor who has missed his cue.

"Since I have known you I have been at once too happy and too wretched. Happy – unspeakably happy in your society; miserable in the knowledge that I could never be more to you than an unit in the crowd."

"You were a great deal more to me than that," said Mabel softly. She bad been on her guard against him just now, but when he thus abased himself before her she took pity upon him, and became dangerously amiable. "I shall never forget your kindness about those wretched verses."

"I will not hear you speak ill of them," cried Lord Mallow indignantly. "You have but shared the common fate of genius, in having a mind in advance of your age."

Lady Mabel breathed a gentle sigh of resignation.

"I am not so weak as to think myself a genius," she murmured; "but I venture to hope my poor verses will be better understood twenty years hence than they are now."

"Undoubtedly!" cried Lord Mallow, with conviction. "Look at Wordsworth; in his lifetime the general reading public considered him a prosy old gentleman, who twaddled pleasantly about lakes and mountains, and pretty little peasant girls. The world only awakened ten years ago to the fact of his being a great poet and a sublime philosopher; and I shouldn't be very much surprised," added Lord Mallow meditatively, "if in ten years more the world were to go to sleep again and forget him."

Lady Mabel looked at her watch.

"I think I will go in and give mamma her afternoon cup of tea," she said.

"Don't go yet," pleaded Lord Mallow, "it is only four, and I know the Duchess does not take tea till five. Give me one of your last hours. A lady who is just going to be married is something like Socrates after his sentence. Her friends surround her; she is in their midst, smiling, serene, diffusing sweetness and light; but they know she is going from them – they are to lose her, yes, to lose her almost as utterly as if she were doomed to die."

"That is taking a very dismal view of marriage," said Mabel, pale, and trifling nervously with her watch-chain.