Not Without Thorns

“I will do so,” he replied. “So you are with the Dalrymples!” – and Eugenia detected, and was not surprised at, a slight shade of annoyance in his tone.

“Yes,” she replied, simply.

“But – but that will not matter?” he inquired, hesitatingly. “You are your own mistress. You will see me? I shall try to see you in an hour or two again. There will be no difficulty about it?”

He had turned to leave her, but waited an instant for her answer.

“Oh, no, there will be no difficulty. I will see you, or write to you,” she said, a little confusedly.

Her last words struck him rather oddly, but he attributed them to her nervousness and embarrassment; and, fearful of increasing these, he left her, as she desired.

And for the next quarter of an hour, till the maid came for her, Eugenia never took her eyes from the path down which Beauchamp had disappeared. “I shall never see him again,” she said to herself; “never, never. I must not. He must not break his word for me. Oh, I hope – I do hope I shall not live much longer.”

When she got back to the hotel, Eugenia found the Dalrymples both out. Mr Dalrymple she knew was off for the day on some expedition; but his wife, she found on inquiry, had left word for her that she would be in in half an hour. So Eugenia went up to her own room, and sitting down, tried to decide what was best to do. She only saw two things clearly, – she must not risk seeing Beauchamp again, and she must confide in Mrs Dalrymple.

“There is no help for it,” she said to herself. “Even if I told her nothing, she is sure to meet him, and she could not but suspect something. It would never do to let her find it out for herself. Why, Roma Eyrecourt is her cousin! No, I must trust her; and I must get her to let me go home at once. I cannot stay here, – I cannot.”

Mrs Dalrymple, returning from her walk, was met by a request that she would at once go to Miss Laurence’s room. She felt a little startled.

“What is the matter? Miss Laurence is not ill, surely?” she said to her maid, who was watching for her with Eugenia’s message.

The young woman, a comparative stranger, answered that she did not know; she had not thought Miss Laurence looking very well when she came in, but she had not complained. Eugenia’s face, however, confirmed her friend’s fears.

“You are ill, my dear child,” she exclaimed at once. “Have you got cold again, do you think? You were looking so well this morning.”

“I am not ill, – truly I am not,” replied Eugenia. “But, dear Mrs Dalrymple, I wanted to see you as soon as you came in, to ask you to be so very, very kind as to let me go home at once, – to-day if possible.”

“Go home to-day! My dear Eugenia, it is out of the question. You must be ill,” said Mrs Dalrymple, considerably perplexed, and half-inclined to think the girl’s brain was affected.

“No, no; it isn’t that. Oh, Mrs Dalrymple, I can’t bear to tell you! I have never spoken of it to any one, – only to one person at least,” she said, correcting herself, as the remembrance of her conversations with Gerald returned to her mind. “But I am sure I can trust you, and you will understand. It is – it is because Captain Chancellor is here that I want to go.”

“My poor child!” said Mrs Dalrymple, very tenderly, drawing Eugenia nearer her as she spoke; and though she said no more, the girl saw how mistaken she had been in imagining that no one had guessed her secret, and a painful flush of shame rose to her brow at the thought.

Then, after a moment’s pause, her friend spoke again.

“You are sure of it?” she inquired. “You are sure that he is here, – actually here? May you not have made, some mistake?”

“Oh, no; I am sure, quite sure,” repeated Eugenia, earnestly. “He is certainly here, staying at Nunswell. For all I know, in this very house.”

Mrs Dalrymple sat silent again for a little, apparently thinking it over.

“I don’t quite understand it,” she said at length; “what he is doing here just now, I mean. I thought he was at Winsley. But all the same, – though of course it is most unfortunate, most peculiarly unfortunate, – the very thing of all others I should most have wished to avoid for you, – all the same, my dear child, I confess I hardly see that it would be right or wise for us to allow it to interfere with our plans. Of course, if you go home, we shall go too. That does not matter; it would make very little difference to us. But don’t you think, Eugenia, it would be just a little undignified, – not to say cowardly, – to seem afraid of him, – to run away whenever he appears? I should like him rather to see, or to think, that he is no more to you than he deserves to be. Don’t be offended with me. I have felt for you and with you more than I can express all through.”

She waited rather anxiously for Eugenia’s answer. It was slow of coming. Mrs Dalrymple began to fear she had gone too far; she could not understand the look of embarrassment on Eugenia’s face.

“Yes,” she said, at last; “you are quite right. It would have been cowardly to have run away had it been as you think, though I dare say I should have wished to do so all the same. I am a coward, I suppose; at least, I entirely distrust my own strength. And I have reason enough to do so,” she added, in a lower tone, hardly intended for her companion’s ears. “But it isn’t quite as you think. It is not only on my own account I want to go away. It is not only that I have seen him – Captain Chancellor, I mean. I have spoken to him. He saw me this morning in the gardens, and came back to speak to me; and – and – if I stay here he will insist on seeing me, and it may be very painful for us all.”

“I don’t understand,” exclaimed Mrs Dalrymple. “What can he want to see you for? What can he have to say to you, – he, engaged to Roma Eyrecourt?”

“I can’t tell you. I am so afraid of making you angry, for of course she is your cousin,” said Eugenia, in great distress. “But still I thought it best to be quite open with you. He forgot himself, – for the time only, I dare say,” she continued, with an irrepressible sigh and a sudden sense of bitter humility. “He saw that I had been ill, and I think he was dreadfully sorry for me, and I was alone, and somehow I suppose I was frightfully undignified, and unmaidenly even,” – the harsh word, though self-inflicted, bringing a painful blush with it. “I dare say it was all my fault, but any way he offered to give up everything for my sake, to break all ties and obstacles.”

“And you accepted such a proposal?” exclaimed Mrs Dalrymple, indignantly, for, after all, “blood is thicker than water,” and the imagined insult to her kinswoman, of such treatment, struck home.

“No, oh, no; of course not,” replied Eugenia, eagerly. “That is what makes me want to go. I had not time – we were interrupted – I could not make him understand that such a thing was impossible, – impossible in every sense, – for him, – for me. Could I, do you think, marry any man who, for my sake, had broken his word to another woman, – had perhaps broken another woman’s heart? Oh, no, no. You do not think I could? I would rather die!”

“And do you think he really meant it?” questioned Mrs Dalrymple. “Certainly I have not seen much of him of late years, but I used to know him well, and I must say it is not the sort of thing I should have imagined him doing. He must be either a better or a worse man than I have supposed – possibly both.”

Eugenia did not reply to the last observation: perhaps she did not hear it. But she answered Mrs Dalrymple’s question.

“I do think he meant it. And I think he will continue to mean it unless it is at once discouraged,” she said; “at once, before he has time to do anything rash with regard to Miss Eyrecourt. It will not be enough for me to refuse to see him – I must go away. While I stay here, any unlucky chance might bring us together again, like this morning. And I cannot trust myself, now that he knows – for he does know,” she turned her face away, “that – that I do care for him, that I would make any sacrifice for him except doing wrong, or letting him do wrong. Though, indeed, I must not boast: no one knows how hard it is not to do wrong, till one is tried.”

“My poor child,” said Mrs Dalrymple, quite as tenderly now as at the beginning of the conversation. And then she added, “I wonder what we should do. I wish Henry were back.”

“When do you think he will be back?” asked Eugenia, influenced not so much by her friend’s wifely belief in Mr Dalrymple’s diplomatic powers as by her own anxiety to obtain his approval of her at once leaving Nunswell.

“I don’t know. Not before evening,” replied her friend.

“And something must be done – should be done before post-time,” said Eugenia. “He said he would call to see me; would it do for me to write a note to be given him when he comes? It will be so difficult to say it. Oh dear, oh dear!”

She got up from her seat, and walked to the window and back again, her hands clasped, in restless misery. There came a knock at the door.

“A gentleman to see Miss Laurence, if you please, ma’am,” said Mrs Dalrymple’s Bertha, importantly. “This is his card. He asked for the young lady staying with you, ma’am.”

Mrs Dalrymple took the card mechanically, and glanced at the name as if there were still any possibility of mistake.

“Captain Chancellor,” the two words stared her in the face, and down in the corner in little letters – “203rd (East Woldshire) Regiment.”

It all looked so straightforward and aboveboard: there was no apparent consciousness of conduct or intentions “unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” And yet the girl he was calmly proposing to treat with ignominy and indignity was her own cousin; the girl for whose sake he proposed so to dishonour himself actually a guest in her own charge! Mrs Dalrymple felt more and more perplexed. How could the young man have the audacity to send up his card in this brazen-faced way? Surely there must be some strange mistake. A sudden thought struck her. She turned to Eugenia, standing pale, and with great, wistful eyes, beside her.

“He does mean it, you see,” whispered the girl.

“Yes, I see,” replied the matron. Then turning to the servant: “Bertha, say to Captain Chancellor we shall see him immediately,” and when Bertha had departed on her errand, “Eugenia, my love,” she said gently, “I think it will be best for me to see him.”

“Very well. Thank you very much,” replied Eugenia, yet with a wild, unreasonable regret that she had been so taken at her word, that fate had not forced her into seeing him again, into the very danger her better nature so dreaded and shrank from.

Volume Two – Chapter Six.

Sunshine

… All hearts in love use their own tongues:
Let every eye negotiate for itself,
And trust no agent.

    Much Ado about Nothing.
Captain Chancellor was standing by the window when Mrs Dalrymple entered the room. As the sound of the door opening caught his ear, he turned sharply round with a look of eager expectancy on his fair, handsome face, which did not escape the notice of Eugenia’s self-constituted guardian, and notwithstanding his habitual good breeding and self-possession, he did not altogether succeed in concealing the disappointment which was caused him by the sight of his old friend’s substantial proportions in the place of the girlish figure he had been watching for. He was eager to see Eugenia again. Unimpulsive though he was by nature, little as he had dreamt but three short hours before of ever again seeing her, of holding her in his arms and calling her his own, he was now almost passionately anxious for her presence. Away from her, he had found it difficult to realise, to justify to himself, this rash, unpremeditated deed he had done – a deed at variance with all his preconceived ideas, all the intentions of his life. But beside her, in the light of her sweet eyes, in the sense of her loveliness, of her delicate grace – above all, of her clinging trust in and entire devotion to himself, he felt that all his scruples and misgivings would vanish into air. He would feel satisfied then of what he tried to believe he felt satisfied of now, that being what he was, a man and not a statue, a “gentleman” who (in his own sense) held honour high, and would scorn to take advantage of a woman’s weakness, he could not have acted otherwise. Fortified thus, he could brave all, – his friends’ probable “chaff” on his weakness, “to think of Chancellor’s throwing himself away after all for a pair of bright eyes;” his sister’s certain disapproval, Roma’s possible contempt. These, and more practical disagreeables, in the shape of poverty, comparatively speaking, at least; the loss of the personal luxuries which even with his limited means had, as a bachelor, been within his easy reach; the general, indescribable descent from the position of a much-made-of young officer without encumbrances, to that of a struggling captain in a line regiment with a delicate wife and too probable family – all these appalling visions already fully recognised, Beauchamp had forthwith set to work to make up his mind to. But he was thirsting for his reward. He was in a very good humour with himself. For the first time in his life he had acted purely on an impulse, and this impulse he imagined to be a much nobler one than it really was. He did not exactly call his conduct by fine names to himself, but in his heart he longed to hear Eugenia do so. He loved her tenderly, he said now to himself that he certainly did so, yet not hitherto so vehemently that he could not have put his love on one side in acknowledgment of weightier considerations. He had been shocked by the change in her appearance, and to some extent took blame to himself in the matter, yet, even while doing so, a slight, a very slight tinge of contempt for her weakness and transparency, mingled itself with his concern and self-reproach. She was not certainly of the stuff of a “Clara Vere de Vere;” there was an amount of undisciplined, unsophisticated effusiveness about her, hardly in accordance with his notion of “thorough-breeding,” yet such as she was she was infinitely sweet; he was only longing to have her beside him to tell her so, to clasp her in his arms again, and kiss the colour into her soft white cheeks.

So it was really very disappointing, instead of Eugenia, to be brought face to face with Mary Dalrymple. He made the best of it, however – in a general way he was very clever at doing so. He came forward with his usual gently pleasant smile, his hand outstretched in greeting, murmuring something about being so pleased, so very pleased to see Mrs Dalrymple again. She hardly appeared to take in the sense of his words.