"Do you know who was at the House to-night, Earlscourt, to hear your speech?" I asked him, as I met him, a couple of hours afterwards, in one of the passages, as he was leaving the House. He had altered much in eight months; he stooped a little from his waist; he looked worn, and his lips were pale. Men said his stamina was not equal to his brain; physicians, that he gave himself too much work and too little sleep. I knew he was more wrapped in public life than ever; that in his place in the government he worked unwearyingly, and that he found time in spare moments for intellectual recreation that would have sufficed for their life's study for most men. Still, I thought possibly there might be a weakness still clinging round his heart, though he never alluded to it; a passion which, though he appeared to have crushed it out, might be sapping his health more than all his work for the nation.
"Do you mean any one in particular? Persigny said he should attend, but I did not see him."
"No, I meant among the ladies. Beatrice Boville was in the seat next me." I had no earthly business to speak of her so abruptly, for when I had seen him for the first time after he left the Bad when Parliament met that February, he had forbidden me ever to mention her name to him, and no allusion to her had ever passed his lips. The worn, stern gravity, that had become his habitual expression, changed for a moment; bullet-proof he might be, but my arrow had shot in through the chain links of his armor; a look of unutterable pain, eagerness, anxiety, passion, passed over his face; but, whatever he felt, he subdued it, though his voice was broken as he answered me:—
"Once for all, I bade you never speak that name to me. Without being forbidden, I should have thought your own feeling, your own delicacy, might—"
"Have checked me? O, hang it, Earlscourt, listen one second without shutting a fellow up. I never broached the subject before, by your desire; but, now I have once broken the ice, I must ask you one question: Are you sure you judged the girl justly? are you sure you were not too quick to slan—"
He pressed his hand on his chest and breathed heavily as I spoke, but he wouldn't let me finish.
"That is enough. Would any man sacrifice what he held dearest wantonly and without proof? She is dear to me now. You are the only living being so thoughtless or so merciless as to force her name upon me, and rake up the one folly, the one madness, the one crowning sorrow of my life. See that you never dare bring forward her name again."
He went out before me into the soft night air. His carriage was waiting; he entered it, threw himself back on its cushions, and was driven off before I had time to break my word of honor to Beatrice Boville, which I felt sorely tempted to do just then. Who among the thousands that heard his briliant speech that night, or read it the next morning, who saw him pass in his carriage, and had him pointed out to them as the finest orator of his day, or dined with him at his ministerial dinners at his house in Park Lane, would have believed that, with all his ambition, fame, honors, and attainments, the one cross, the one shadow, the one dark thread, in the successful stateman's life, was due to a woman's hand, and that underneath all his strength lay that single weakness, sapping and undermining it?
"Did you see that girl Boville at the House last night?" Lady Clive (who had smiled most sweetly ever since her thorns had brought forth their fruit—her son would be his heir—Earlscourt would never marry now!) said to me, the next day, at one of the Musical Society concerts. "Incredible effrontery, wasn't it, in her, to come and hear Earlscourt's speech? One would have imagined that conscience and delicacy might have made her reluctant to see him, instead of letting her voluntarily seek his own legislative chamber, and listen coolly for an hour and a half to the man whom she misled and deceived so disgracefully."
I laughed to think how long a time a woman's malice will flourish, n'importe how victorious it may have been in crushing its object, or how harmless that object may have become.
"You are very bitter about her still, Lady Clive. Is that quite fair? You know you were so much obliged to her for throwing Earlscourt away. You want Horace to come in for the title, don't you?" Which truism being unpalatable, Lady Clive averred that she had no wish on earth but for Earlscourt's happiness; that of course she naturally grieved for his betrayal by that little intrigante, but that had his marriage been a well-advised one, nobody would have rejoiced more, etc., etc., and bade me be silent and listen to Vieuxtemps, both of which commands I obeyed, pondering in my own mind whether I should go and call in Lowndes Square or not: if anybody heard of it, they would think it odd for me alone, of all the family, to continue acquainted with a girl whom report (circulated through Lady Clive) said had used Earlscourt so ill, and wrong constructions might get put upon it; but, thank God! I never have considered the qu'en dira-t-on. If constructions are wrong, to the deuce with them! they matter nothing to sensible people; and the man who lives in dread of "reports" will have to shift his conduct as the old man of immortal fable shifted his donkey, and won't ever journey in any peace at all. If anybody remarked my visiting Lowndes Square, I couldn't help it: I wanted to see Beatrice Boville again, and to Lowndes Square, after the concert, I drove my tilbury accordingly, which, as that turn-out is known pretty tolerably in those parts, I should be wisest to leave behind me when I don't want my calls noticed. By good fortune, I saw Beatrice alone. They were going to drive in the Park, and she was in the drawing room, dressed and waiting for her aunt. She was not altered: at her age sorrow doesn't tell physically as it does at Earlscourt's. In youth we have Hope; later on we know that of all the gifts of Pandora's box none are so treacherous and delusive as the one that Pandora left at the bottom. True, Beatrice had none of that insouciant, shadowless brightness that had been her chief charm at Lemongenseidlitz, but she was one of those women whose attractions, dependent on fascination, not on beauty, grow more instead of less as time goes on. She met me with a trace of embarrassment; but she was always self-possessed under any amount of difficulties, and stood chatting, a trifle hurriedly, of all the subjects of the year, of anything, I dare say, rather than of that speech the night before, or of the secret of which I was her sole confidant. But I was not going to let her off so easily. I had come there for a definite purpose, and was not going away without accomplishing it. I was afraid every second that Lady Mechlin might come down, or some visitor enter, and as she sat in a low chair among the flowers in the window, leant towards her, and plunged into it in medias res.
"Miss Boville, I want you to release me from my promise."
She looked up, her face flushing slightly, but her lips and eyes shadowed already with that determined pride and hauteur that they had worn the last time I had seen her. She did not speak, but played with the boughs of a coronella near her.
"You remember" (I went on speaking as briefly as possible, lest the old lady's toilet should be finished, and our tête-à-tête cut short) "I gave you my word of honor never to speak again of what you told me in the Kursaal last autumn until you gave me leave; that leave I ask you for now. Silence