A Rent In A Cloud

Without a word he followed her down the stairs, and across the hall, and up another small stair. “Wait a moment,” said she, opening the door, and then as quickly she turned and beckoned him to enter.

Still dressed, but with her hair falling loose about her, and her dress disordered, Florence lay on her bed as in a trance – so light her breathing you could see no motion of the chest Her eyes were partly opened, and lips parted: but even these gave to her face a greater look of death.

“She is sleeping at last,” whispered Miss Grainger. “She has not spoken since you were here.”

Loyd knelt down; beside: the bed, and pressed his cheek against her cold hand; and the day dawn, as it streamed in between the shutters, saw him still there.

CHAPTER XVII. PARTING SORROWS

HOUR after hour Loyd knelt beside the bed where Florence lay, motionless and unconscious. Her aunt and sister glided noiselessly about, passed in and out of the room, rarely speaking, and then but in a whisper. At last a servant whispered in Loyd’s ear a message. He started and said, “Yes, let him wait;” and then, in a moment after, added, “No, say no. I’ll not want the boat – the luggage may be taken back to my room.”

It was a few minutes after this that Emily came behind him, and, bending down so as to speak in his ear, said, “How I thank you, my dear brother, for this! I know the price of your devotion – none of us will ever forget it.”

He made no answer, but pressed the cold damp hand he held to his lips.

“Does he know that it is nigh seven o’clock, Milly, and that he must be at Como a quarter before eight, or he’ll lose the train?” said Miss Grainger to her niece.

“He knows it all, aunt; he has sent away the boat; he will not desert us.”

“Remember, child, what it is he is sacrificing. It may chance to be his whole future fortune.”

“He’ll stay, let it cost what it may,” said Emily.

“I declare I think I will speak to him. It is my duty to speak to him,” said the old lady, in her own fussy, officious tone. “I will not expose myself to the reproaches of his family – very just reproaches, too, if they imagined we had detained him. He will lose, not only his passage out to India, but, not impossibly, his appointment too.

“Joseph, Joseph, I have a word to say to you.”

“Dearest aunt, I implore you not to say it,” cried Emily.

“Nonsense, child. Is it for a mere tiff and a fit of hysterics a man is to lose his livelihood? Joseph Loyd, come into the next room for a moment.”

“I cannot leave this,” said he, in a low, faint voice: “say what you have to say to me here.”

“It is on the stroke of seven.”

He nodded.

“The train leaves a quarter before eight, and if you don’t start by this one you can’t reach Leghorn by Tuesday.”

“I know it; I’m not going.”

“Do you mean to give up your appointment?” asked she, in a voice of almost scornful reproach.

“I mean, that I’ll not go.”

“What will your friends say to this?” said she, angrily.

“I have not thought, nor can I think, of that now: my place is here.”

“Then I must protest; and I beg you to remember that I have protested against this resolve on your part. Your family are not to say, hereafter, that it was through any interference or influence of ours that you took this unhappy determination. I’ll write, this very day, to your father and say so. There, it is striking seven now!”

He made no reply; indeed, it seemed as if he had not heard her.

“You might still be in time, if you were to exert yourself.” whispered she, with more earnestness.

“I tell you again,” said he, raising his voice to a louder pitch, “that my place is here, and I will not leave her.”

A low, faint sigh was breathed by the sick girl, and gently moving her hand, she laid it on his head.

“You know me then, dearest?” whispered he. “You know who it is kneels beside you?”

She made no answer, but her feeble fingers tried to play with his hair, and strayed, unguided, over his head.

What shape of reproach, remonstrance, or protest, Miss Grainger’s mutterings took, is not recorded; but she bustled out of the room, evidently displeased with all in it.

“She knows you, Joseph. She is trying to thank you,” said Emily.

“Her lips are moving: can you hear what she says, Milly?”

The girl bent over the bed, till her ear almost touched her sister’s mouth. “Yes, darling, from his heart he does. He never loved you with such devotion as now. She asks if you can forgive her, Joseph. She remembers everything.”

“And not leave me,” sighed Florence, in a voice barely audible.

“No, my own dearest, I will not leave you,” was all that he could utter in the conflict of joy and sorrow he felt A weak attempt to thank him she made by an effort to press his hand, but it sent a thrill of delight through his heart, more than a recompense for all he had suffered.

If Emily, with a generous delicacy, retired towards the window and took up her work, not very profitably perhaps, seeing how little light came through the nearly closed shutters, let us not show ourselves less discreet, and leave the lovers to themselves. Be assured, dear reader, that in our reserve on this point we are not less mindful of your benefit than of theirs. The charming things, so delightful to say and so ecstatic to hear, are wonderfully tame to tell. Perhaps their very charm is in the fact, that their spell was only powerful to those who uttered them. At all events, we are determined on discretion, and shall only own that, though Aunt Grainger made periodical visits to the sick-room, with frequent references to the hour of the day, and the departures and arrival of various rail trains, they never heard her, or, indeed, knew that she was present.

And though she was mistress of those “asides” and that grand innuendo style which is so deadly round a corner, they never paid the slightest heed to her fire. All the adroit references to the weather, and the “glorious day for travelling,” went for naught As well as the more subtle compliments she made Florence on the appetite she displayed for her chocolate, and which were intended to convey that a young lady who enjoyed her breakfast so heartily need never have lost a man a passage to Calcutta for the pleasure of seeing her eat it. Truth was, Aunt Grainger was not in love, and consequently, no more fit to legislate for those who were than a peasant in rude health is to sympathise with the nervous irritability of a fine lady! Neither was Milly in love, you will perhaps say, and she felt for them. True, but Milly might be – Milly was constitutionally exposed to the malady, and the very vicinity of the disease was what the faculty call a predisposing cause. It made her very happy to see Joseph so fond, and Florence so contented.

Far too happy to think of the price he paid for his happiness, Loyd passed the day beside her. Never before was he so much in love! Indeed, it was not till the thought of losing her for ever presented itself, that he knew or felt what a blank life would hereafter become to him. Some quaint German writer has it that these little quarrels which lovers occasionally get up as a sort of trial of their own powers of independence, are like the attempt people make to remain a long time under-water, and which only end in a profound conviction that their organisation was unequal to the test But there is another form these passing differences occasionally take. Each of the erring parties is sure to nourish in his or her heart the feeling of being most intensely beloved by the other! It is a strange form for selfishness to take, but selfishness is the most Protaean of all failings, and there never was seen the mask it could not fit to its face.

“And so you imagined you could cast me off, Florence!” “And you, Master Joseph, had the presumption to think you could leave me,” formed the sum and substance of that long day’s whispering. My dear, kind reader, do not despise the sermon from the seeming simplicity of the text There is a deal to be said on it, and very pleasantly said, too. It is, besides, a sort of litigation in which charge and cross charge recur incessantly, and, as in all amicable suits, each party pays his own costs.

It was fortunate, most fortunate, that their reconciliation took this form. It enabled each to do that which was most imminent to be done – to ignore Calvert altogether, and never recur to any mention of his name. Loyd saw that the turquoise ring was no longer worn by her, and she, with a woman’s quickness, noted his observation of the fact I am not sure that in her eyes a recognition of his joy did not glisten, but she certainly never uttered a word that could bring up his name.

“So I am your guest, Madam, for ten days more!” said Loyd to Miss Grainger, as they sat at tea that night.

“Oh, we are only too happy. It is a very great pleasure to us, if – if we could feel that your delay may not prove injurious to you.”

“It will be very enjoyable, at all events,” said he, with an easy smile, and as though to evade the discussion of the other “count”.

“I was thinking of what your friends would say about it.”

“It is a very limited public, I assure you,” said he, laughing, “and one which so implicitly trusts me, that I have only to say I have done what I believed to be right to be confirmed in their good esteem.”

The old lady was not to be put off by generalities, and she questioned him closely as to whether an overland passage did not cost a hundred pounds and upwards, and all but asked whether it was quite convenient to him to disburse that amount She hinted something about an adage of people who “paid for their whistle,” but suggested some grave doubts if they ever felt themselves recompensed in after time by recollecting the music that had cost so dearly; in a word, she made herself supremely disagreeable while he drank his tea, and only too glad to make his escape to go and sit beside Florry, and talk over again all they had said in the morning.

“Only think, Milly,” said she, poutingly, as her sister entered, “how Aunt Grainger is worrying poor Joseph, and won’t let him enjoy in peace the few days we are to have together.”