Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/392

384 It recalled Lucy, it recalled the past connected with her, all too painfully to his mind; and he returned an evasive answer. He never willingly recalled her, or it: if they obtruded themselves on his memory—as they very often did—he drove them away, as he was driving them now.

He quitted the house, and Lady Verner proceeded up-stairs to Decima’s room. That pretty room, with its blue panels and hangings, where Lionel used to be when he was growing convalescent. Decima and Lucy were in it now. “I wish you to go out with me to make a call,” she said to them.

“Both of us, mamma?” inquired Decima.

“Both,” repeated Lady Verner. “It is a call of etiquette,” she added, a sound of irony, mixing in the tone, “and therefore you must both make it. It is to Lionel’s chosen wife.”

A hot flush passed into the face of Lucy Tempest: hot words rose to her lips. Hasty, thoughtless, impulsive words, to the effect that she could not pay a visit to the chosen wife of Lionel Verner.

But she checked them ere they were spoken. She turned to the window, which had been opened to the early spring day, and suffered the cool air to blow on her flushed face, and calmed down her impetuous thoughts. Was this the course of conduct that she had marked out for herself? She looked round at Lady Verner and said, in a gentle tone, that she would be ready at any hour named.

“We will go at once,” replied Lady Verner. “I have ordered the carriage. The sooner we make it—as we have to make it—the better.”

There was no mistake about it. Lucy had grown to love Lionel Verner. How she loved him, esteemed him, venerated him; none, save her own heart, could tell. Her days had been as one long dream of Eden. The very aspect of the world had changed: the blue sky, the soft breathing wind, the scent of the budding flowers, had spoken a language to her, never before learned: “Rejoice in us, for we are lovely!” It was the strange bliss in her own heart that threw its rose hues over the face of nature, the sweet, mysterious rapture arising from love’s first dream: which can never be described by mortal pen; and never, while it lasts, can be spoken of by living tongue. While it lasts. It never does last. It is the one sole ecstatic phase of life, the solitary romance stealing in once, and but once, amidst the world’s hard realities; the “fire filched for us from heaven.” Has it to arise yet for you—you, who read this? Do not trust it when it comes, for it will be fleeting as a summer cloud. Enjoy it, revel in it while you hold it; it will lift you out of earth’s clay and earth’s evil, with its angel wings; but trust not to its remaining: even while you are saying, “I will make it mine for ever,” it is gone. It had gone for Lucy Tempest. And, oh! better for her, perhaps, that it should go: better, perhaps, for all: for if that sweet glimpse of paradise could take up its abode permanently in the heart, we should never look, or wish, or pray for that better Paradise which has to come hereafter.

But who can see this in the sharp flood tide of despair? Not Lucy. In losing Lionel she had lost all: and nothing remained for her but to do battle with her trouble alone. Passionately and truly as Lionel had loved Sibylla; so, in her turn, did Lucy love him.

It is not the fashion now for young ladies to die of broken hearts—as it was in the old days. A little while given to “the grief that kills,” and then Lucy strove to arouse herself to better things. She would go upon her way, burying all feelings within her; she would meet him and others with a calm exterior and placid smile; none should see that she suffered: no, though her heart were breaking.

“I will forget him,” she murmured to herself ten times in the day. “What a mercy that I did not let him see I loved him! I never should have loved him, but that I thought he—Psha! why do I recal it? I was mistaken; I was stupid—and all that’s left to me is, to make the best of it.”

So she drove her thoughts away, as Lionel did. She set out on her course bravely, with the determination to forget him. She schooled her heart, and schooled her face, and believed she was doing great things. To Lionel she cast no blame—and that was unfortunate for the forgetting scheme. She blamed herself; not Lionel. Remarkably simple and humble-minded, Lucy Tempest was accustomed to think of every one before herself. Who was she, that she should have assumed Lionel Verner was growing to love her? Sometimes she would glance at another phase of the picture: That Lionel had been growing to love her; but that Sibylla Massingbird had, in some weak moment, by some sleight of hand, drawn him to her again, extracted from him a promise that he could not retract. She did not dwell upon this; she drove it from her, as she drove away, or strove to drive away, the other thoughts: although the theory, regarding the night of Sibylla’s return, was the favourite theory of Lady Verner. Altogether, I say, circumstances were not very favourable towards Lucy’s plan of forgetting him.

Lady Verner’s carriage—the most fascinating carriage in all Deerham, with its blue and silver appointments, its fine horses, all the present of Lionel—conveyed them to the house of Dr. West. Lady Verner would not have gone otherwise than in state, for untold gold. Distance allowing her, for she was not a good walker, she would have gone on foot, without attendants, to visit the Countess of Elmsley and Lady Mary; but not Sibylla. You can understand the distinction.

They arrived at an inopportune moment, for Lionel was there. At least, Lionel thought it inopportune. On leaving his mother’s house he had gone to Sibylla’s. And, however gratified he may have been by the speedy compliance of his mother with his request, he had very much preferred, himself, not to be present, if the call comprised, as he saw it did comprise, Lucy Tempest.

Sibylla was at home alone; her sisters were out. She had been leaning back in an invalid chair, listening to the words of Lionel, when a servant opened the door and announced Lady Verner. Neither had observed the stopping of the carriage. Carriages often stopped at the house, and visitors entered it: but they were