Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/226

218 what they are. I am sorry to have said so much. I—I think I forgot it was to you that I spoke.”

“Forgot!” exclaimed Lionel. “Forgot what?”

She had hesitated at the last sentence, and she now blushed vividly.

“I forgot for the moment that he was Sibylla’s father,” she simply said.

Again the scarlet rose in the face of Lionel. Lucy stood against the window-frame but a few paces from him, her large soft eyes, in their earnest sympathy, lifted to his. He positively shrunk from them.

“What’s Sibylla to me?” he asked. “She is Mrs. Frederick Massingbird.”

Lucy stood in penitence.

“Do not be angry with me,” she timidly cried. “I ought not to have said it to you, perhaps. I see it always.”

“See what, Lucy?” he continued, speaking gently, not in anger.

“I see how much you think of her, and how ill it makes you. When Jan asked just now if you had anything on your mind to keep you back, I knew what it was.”

Lionel grew hot and cold with a sudden fear.

“Did I say anything in my delirium?”

“Nothing at all—that I heard of. I was not with you. I do not think anybody suspects that you are ill because—because of her.”

“Ill because of her!” he sharply repeated; the words breaking from him in his agony, in his shrinking dread at finding so much suspected. “I am ill from fever. What else should I be ill from?”

Lucy went close to his chair, and stood before him meekly.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered. “I cannot help seeing things, but I did not mean to make you angry.”

He rose, steadying himself by the table, and laid his hand upon her head, with the same fond motion that a father might have used.

“Lucy, I am not angry. Only vexed at being watched so closely,” he concluded, his lips parting with a faint smile.

In her earnest, truthful, serious face of concern, as it was turned up to him, he read how futile it would be to persist in his denial.

“I did not watch you for the purpose of watching. I saw how it was, without being able to help myself.”

Lionel bent his head.

“Let the secret remain between us, Lucy. Never suffer a hint of it to escape your lips.”

Nothing answered him save the glad expression that beamed out from her countenance, telling him how implicitly he might trust to her.

fought through a phalanx of crinolines, and I have won the glittering sight—stars of earth in a firmament of purple velvet—sparklings of light ad infinitum, enhanced by a golden halo of fabulous cost, eloquence of splendour, which has enthralled the daughters of Eve in all ages—the dark-eyed beauties of the East, sunk into ignorance and steeped in sensuality, and the bright-eyed intelligence of educated English women.

I am fascinated by the sight; I am bewildered by a conflict of ideas. I venture to ask the very impassive and gentlemanly person who stands as guardian of the show-case, the price of a certain parure of diamonds? the reply is vouchsafed in an off-hand business voice—a reply which should have been dignified by trumpets and salvoes of cannons—sixty thousand pounds!

I evolve myself from the meshes of the crinolines; I struggle to a vacant seat near the experimental Venus of Gibson. “Sixty thousand pounds!” I mutter to myself, pondering the whole matter, till in the end my reason stubbornly denies the testimony of my eyes and ears, and vehemently declares the whole affair of the diamonds to be a delusion.

I naturally hesitate for awhile before renouncing my eyes and ears, and then my reason grows vehemently argumentative.

In the first place, it denies that the parure of diamonds could ever be offered for sale; in the next, that, if offered for sale, it would ever be bought.

I confess I was rather amazed by the boldness of my reason; but, nevertheless, I felt bound to listen to the arguments it advanced in support of these propositions.

“Sixty thousand pounds,” observed my reason, “is, if invested at five per cent., 3000l. per annum; but, if invested in diamonds, the interest is nil: be good enough to bear that little word, ‘nil,’ in mind, while we proceed to analyse the various elements represented by this sum of sixty thousand pounds.

“We will, in the first place, consider the case of a person buying land to re-sell; now, however long he may hold the land, it pays him a certain interest for the money he has invested, and inasmuch as he has received that interest, he can afford to re-sell the land at the price which he originally gave; but if the person had purchased diamonds, instead of land, he must, in addition to the cost price, be repaid for the loss of interest he has sustained during the period the stones remained in his hands.”

“Now,” said I to my reason, “I think I have bowled you out! Why do picture-dealers buy pictures? Pictures don’t return any interest for the money invested in them! Hullo, old boy! that’s a shut up; isn’t it?”

My reason reflected for a few moments—it was not in the slightest degree irritated by my derisive tone, and it replied with the utmost calmness:

“Pictures, you must observe, are purchased by dealers on the supposition that the value they give will, at a future period, be so largely increased as to cover both the original cost and the accumulated interest. We have innumerable examples of the immense difference in price which the works of a great painter commanded at the commencement and at the termination of his career. The fame of a great man out-distances all accumulations of compound interest on the original price of his early and perhaps finest works—for one grudging buyer of the work of an unknown