Page:Cerise, a tale of the last century (IA cerisetaleoflast00whytrich).pdf/413

 had committed some injustice to a poor helpless being, that he could never now repay. A lower nature incapable of the sentiment would in its inferiority have been spared much needless pain. It was as if he had wounded a child, a lamb, or some such weak loveable creature, by accident, and could not stanch the wound. It would have been cowardly had he meant it, but he did not mean it, and it was only clumsy; yet none the less was he haunted by the patient eyes, the mute appealing sorrow that spoke so humbly to his heart.

What if this girl, whose affection he had never doubted, did really not love him after all? What if the fancy that he knew she had entertained for him was but a girl's fancy for the first man who had roused her vanity and flattered her self-esteem? It might be that she had only prized him because she had seen so few others, that her ideal was something quite different, he said in bitterness of spirit, to a rough ignorant soldier, a mere hunting, hawking, north-country baronet, whose good qualities, if he had any, were but a blunt honesty, and an affection for herself he had not the wit to express; whose personal advantages did but consist in a strong arm, and a weather-browned cheek, like any ploughman on his estate. Perhaps the man who would really have suited her was of a different type altogether, a refined scholar, an accomplished courtier, one who could overlay a masculine understanding with the graceful trickeries of a woman's fancy, who could talk to her of sentiment, romance, affinity of spirits, and congeniality of character. Such a man as this pale-faced priest—not him in particular, that had nothing to do with it! but some one like him—there were hundreds of them whom she might meet at any time. It was not that he thought she loved another, but that the possibility now dawned of her not loving him.

He did not realise this at first. It was long before he could bring himself to look such a privation in the face—the blank it would make in his own life was too chilling to contemplate—and to do him justice his first thought was not of his own certain misery, but of her lost chances of happiness. If now, when it was too late, she should find one whom she could really love, had he not stood between