His face dyed white, his eyes filled with passionate anguish. He crushed her hand in his.
"Too late! Great Heavens! Answer me, child, I entreat you—I beseech you—is it 'too late' because report is true that you have replaced me with your cousin—that you are engaged to Hervey? Tell me truth now, for pity's sake. I will be trifled with no longer."
Beatrice threw back her haughty little head contemptuously, though ladies don't sneer at the idea of being liées with me generally, I can assure you. Her heart throbbed triumphantly and joyously. She had conquered him at last. The man of giant intellect and haughty will had bowed to her. She held him by a thread, he who ruled the fate of nations!—and she loved him so dearly! But the Pythoness was not wholly tamed, and she could not even yet forget her wrongs.
"You told me before I spoke falsehoods to you, Lord Earlscourt; my word would find no more credence now."
He looked at her, dropped her hand, and turned away, before Beatrice could detain him. Five minutes after he left the house. Little as I guessed it, he was jealous of me—I! who never in my own life rivalled any man who wished to marry! Beatrice had fully revenged herself. I wonder if she enjoyed it quite as much as she had anticipated, as she stood where he had left her looking out on the Green Park?
I went with Beatrice and her party to the Lords that night; it was the tug of war for the bill which Earlscourt was so determined should pass, and a great speech was expected from him. We were not disappointed. When he rose he spoke with effort, and his oratory suffered from the slight hoarseness of his voice, for half the beauty of his rhetoric lay in the flexibility and music of his tones; still, it was emphatically a great speech, and Beatrice Boville listened to it breathlessly, with her eyes fixed on the face—weary, worn, but grandly intellectual—of the man whom Europe reverenced, and she—a girl of twenty!—ruled. Perhaps her heart smote her for the lines she had added there; perhaps she felt her pride misplaced to him, great as he was, with his stainless honor and unequalled genius; perhaps she thought of how, with all his strength, his hand had trembled as it touched hers; and how, with all her love, she had been wilful and naughty to him a second time. His voice grew weaker as he ended, and he spoke with visible effort; still it was one of his greatest political triumphs: his bill passed by a large majority, and the papers, the morning after, filled their leading articles with admiration of Viscount Earlscourt's speech. But before those journals were out, Earlscourt was too ill almost to notice the success of his measures: as he left the House, the presiding devil of beloved Albion, that plays the deuce with English statesmen as with Italian cantatrices—the confounded east wind—had caught him, finished what over-exertion had begun, and knocked him over, prostrated with severe bronchitis. What pity it is that the body will levy such cruel black mail upon the mind; that a gust of wind, a horse's plunge, the effluvia of a sewer, the carelessness of a pointsman, can destroy the grandest intellect, sweep off the men whose genius lights the world, as ruthlessly as a storm of rain a cloud of gnats, and strike Peel and Canning, Macaulay and Donaldson, in the prime of their power, as heedlessly as peasants little higher than the brutes, dull as the clods of their own valley, who stake their ambitions on a surfeit of fat bacon, and can barely scrawl their names upon a slate!
Unconscious that Earlscourt's jealousy had fastened so wrongly upon me, I was calling upon Beatrice late the next morning, ignorant myself of his illness, when his physician, who was Lady Mechlin's too, while paying her a complimentary visit, regretted to me my cousin's sudden attack.
"Lord Earlscourt would speak last night," he began. "I entreated him not; but those public men are so obstinate; to-day he is very ill—very ill indeed, though prompt measures stopped the worst. He has risen to dictate something of importance to his secretary; he would work his brain if he were dying; but it has taken a severe hold on him, I fear. I shall send him somewhere south as soon as he can leave the house, which will not be for some weeks. He would be a great loss to the country. We have not such another foreign minister. But I admit to you, Major Hervey—though of course I do not wish it to go further—that I do think very seriously of Lord Earlscourt's state of health."
Beatrice heard him as she sat at her Davenport; her face grew white, and her eyes filled with great anguish. She thought of his words to her only the day before, and of how her pride had repelled him a second time. I saw her hand clinch on the pen she was playing with, and her teeth set tight together, her habitual action under any strong emotion, thinking to herself, no doubt, "And my last words to him were bitter ones!"
When the physician had left, I went up to her.—
"Beatrice, you must let me tell him now!"
She did not answer, but her hand clinched tighter on the pen-handle.
"His life is in your hands; for God's sake relinquish your pride."
But her pride was strong in her, and dear to her still, strong and dear as her love; and the two struggled together. Earlscourt had bowed his pride to her; but she had not yielded up her own, and it cost her much to yield it even now. All the Pythoness in her was not tamed yet. She was silent—she wavered—then her great love for him vanquished all else. She rose, white as death, her passionate eyes full of unshed tears, the bitterest, yet the softest, Beatrice Boville had ever known.
"Take me to him. No one shall tell him but myself."
Earlscourt was lying on a couch in his library; he had been unable to dictate or to write himself, for severe remedies had prostrated him utterly, and he could not speak above his breath, though he was loath to give up, and acknowledge himself as ill as he was. His eyes were closed, his forehead knitted together in pain, and his labored breathing told plainly enough how fiercely his foe had attacked him, and that it was by no means conquered yet. He had not slept all night, and had fallen into a short slumber now, desiring his attendants to leave him. I bade the groom of the chambers let us enter unannounced, and, opening the door myself, signed to Beatrice to go in, while her aunt and I waited in the anteroom. She stopped a moment at the entrance; her pride had its last struggle; but he turned restlessly, with a weary sigh, and by that sigh the Pythoness was conquered. Beatrice went forward and fell on her knees beside his sofa, bending down till her lips touched his brow, and her hot tears fell on his hands.
"I was too proud last night to tell you you misjudged me. I have no pride now. I am your own—wholly your own. I never loved, I never should love, any but you. I forgive you now. O, how could you ever doubt me? Lord Earlscourt—Ernest—may we not yet be all we once were to one another?"
Awakened by her kisses on his brow, bewildered by her sudden appearance, he tried to rise, but sank back exhausted. He did not disbelieve her now. He had no voice to speak to her, no strength to answer her; but he drew her down closer and closer to him, as she knelt by him, and, as her heart beat once more against his, the little Pythoness, tamed at last, threw her arms round him and sobbed like a child on his breast. And so—Beatrice Boville took her best Revenge!—while I shut the library door, invited Lady Mechlin to inspect Earlscourt's collection of French pictures, and asked what she thought of Punch this week.
I don't know what his physicians would have said of the treatment, as they'd recommended him "perfect quiet;" all I do know is, that though Earlscourt went to the south of Europe as soon as he could leave the house, Beatrice Boville went with him; and he took his place on the benches and in the cabinet this season, without any trace of bronchia, or any sign of wearing out.
Lady Clive, I regret to say, "does not know" Lady Earlscourt: anything for her beloved brother she would do, were it possible; but she hopes we understand that, for her daughters' sakes, she feels it quite impossible to countenance that "shocking little intrigante."
A LINE IN THE "DAILY."
A LINE IN THE "DAILY."