Page:ONCE A WEEK JUL TO DEC 1860.pdf/347

22, 1860.] congratulated her, saying, however:—“Changes of this sort don’t come of conviction. Wait till you see her at home. I think they have been sticking pins into the sore part.”

Drummond knew Rose well. In reality there was no change in her. She was only a suppliant to be spared from ridicule: spared from the application of the scourge she had woven for herself.

And, ah! to one who deigned to think warmly still of such a disgraced silly creature, with what gratitude she turned! He might well suppose love alone could pour that profusion of jewels at his feet.

Ferdinand, now Lord Laxley, understood the merits of his finger-nails better than the nature of young women; but he is not to be blamed for presuming that Rose had learnt to adore him. Else why did she like his company so much? He was not mistaken in thinking she looked up to him. She seemed to beg to be taken into his noble serenity. In truth, she sighed to feel as he did, above everybody—she that hath fallen so low! Above everybody!—born above them, and therefore superior by grace divine! To this Rose Jocelyn had come—she envied the mind of Ferdinand!

He, you may be sure, was quite prepared to accept her homage. Rose he had always known to be just the girl for him; spirited, fresh, and with fine teeth; and once tied to you safe to be staunch. They walked together, rode together, danced together. Her soft humility touched him to eloquence. Say she was a little hypocrite, if you like, when the blood came to her cheeks under his eyes. Say she was a heartless minx for allowing it to be bruited that she and Ferdinand were betrothed. I can but tell you that her blushes were blushes of gratitude to one who could devote his time to such a disgraced silly creature, and that she, in her abject state, felt a secret pleasure in the protection Ferdinand’s name appeared to extend over her: and was hardly willing to lose it.

So far Lady Elburne’s tact and discipline had been highly successful. One morning, in May, Ferdinand, strolling with Rose down the garden, made a positive appeal to her common sense and friendly feeling; by which she understood that he wanted her consent to his marriage with her.

Rose answered:

“Who would have me?”

Ferdinand spoke pretty well, and ultimately got possession of her hand. She let him keep it, thinking him noble for forgetting that another had pressed it before him.

Some minutes later the letters were delivered. One of them contained Juliana’s dark-winged missive.

“Poor, poor Juley!” said Rose, dropping her head, after reading all that was on the crumpled leaf with an inflexible face. And then, talking on, long low sighs lifted her bosom at intervals. She gazed from time to time with a wistful conciliatory air on Ferdinand. Rushing to her chamber, the first cry her soul framed was: “He did not kiss me!”

The young have a superstitious sense of something incontestably true in the final protestations of the dead. Evan guiltless! she could not quite take the meaning this revelation involved. That which had been dead was beginning to move within her; but blindly: and now it stirred and troubled; now sank. Guiltless?—all she had thought him! Oh! she knew she could not have been deceived. But why, why had he hidden his sacrifice from her?

“It is better for us both, of course,” said Rose, speaking the world’s wisdom, parrot-like, and bursting into tears the next minute. Guiltless, and gloriously guiltless! but nothing—nothing to her!

She tried to blame him. It would not do. She tried to think of that grovelling loathsome position she had had painted to her by Lady Elburne’s graphic hand. Evan dispersed the gloomy shades like sunshine. Then in a sort of terror she rejoiced to think she was partially engaged to Ferdinand, and found herself crying again with exultation, that he had not kissed her: for a kiss on her mouth was to Rose a pledge and a bond.

The struggle searched her through: bared her weakness, probed her strength: and she, seeing herself, suffered grievously in her self-love. Am I such a coward, inconstant, cold? she asked. Confirmatory answers coming flung her back under the shield of Ferdinand: if, for a moment, her soul stood up armed and defiant, it was Evan’s hand she took.

To whom do I belong? was another terrible question. To her ideas, if Evan was not chargeable with that baseness which had sundered them, he might claim her yet, if he would. If he did, what then? Must she go to him?

Impossible: she was in chains. Besides, what a din of laughter there would be to see her led away by him! Twisting her joined hands: weeping for her cousin, as she thought, Rose passed hours of torment over Juliana’s legacy to her.

“Why did I doubt him?” she cried, jealous that any soul should have known and trusted him better. Jealous: and I am afraid that the kindling of that one feature of love relighted the fire of her passion thus fervidly. To be outstripped in generosity was hateful to her. Rose, naturally, could not reflect that a young creature like herself, fighting against the world, as we call it, has all her faculties at the utmost stretch, and is often betrayed by failing nature when the will is still valiant.

And here she sat—in chains! “Yes! I am fit only to be the wife of an idle brainless man, with money and a title,” she said, in extreme self-contempt. She caught a glimpse of her whole life in the horrid tomb of his embrace, and questions whether she could yield her hand to him—whether it was right in the eyes of Heaven, rushed impetuously to console her, and defied anything in the shape of satisfactory affirmations. Nevertheless, the end of the struggle was, that she felt that she was bound to Ferdinand.

“But this I will do,” said Rose, standing with heat-bright eyes and deep-coloured cheeks before the glass. “I will clear his character at Beckley. I will help him. I will be his friend. I will