nephew in his recall, but I highly honour the generous perseverance with which he has effected it; and I am happy to acknowledge that the subject is worthy of his enthusiasm. Animosity may be laid aside now, and you may tell Mr. Harold Alison that I heartily congratulate him.'
'And he--Count Stanislas we call him--sees now that he was mistaken,' I said.
'Does he? That is the best of the higher stamp of men, my dear. They know when they are wrong, and own it. In fact, that's the greatest difference between men. The feeble and self-opinionated never acknowledge an error, but the truly sincere can confess and retrieve their hallucinations and prejudices. Well, I am glad to have seen Prometesky, and to be disabused of aome ideas respecting him.'
Count Stanislas, on the other hand, received me with, 'So that is Erymanth! The tyrant, against whom we raged, proves a charitable, benevolent, prosy old gentleman. How many illusions a few decades dispel, and how much hatred one wastes!'
Lord Erymanth had told me that his sister would soon be at home, and in September I was surprised by a call from Dermot. 'Yes, I'm at Arked,' he said, 'Killy Marey is full of Dublin workmen. My uncle has undertaken to make it habitable for me, like an old brick, and, in the meantime, there's not a room fit to smoke or sleep in, so I'm come home like a dutiful son.'
'Then your mother is come?'
'Oh yes; she is come for six weeks, and then she and the St. Glears are to join company and winter at Rome.'
'At Rome?'
'Prevention, you see,' said Dermot, with a twinkle in his eye, as if he were not very uneasy. 'The question is whether it is in time. She will have Piggy's attentions at Christmas. He is to come out for the vacation.'
Then he further told me that his mother had brought home with her a Mrs. Sandford with a daughter, heiress to L60,000, and to a newly- bought estate in Surrey, and newly-built house 'of the most desirable description,' he added, shrugging his shoulders.
'And what sort of a young lady is she?'
'Oh, very desirable, too, I suppose.'
'But what is she like?'
'Like? Oh, like other people,' and he whistled a little, seeming relieved when 'Count Stanislas' came in, and soon after going to hunt up Harry at the Hydriot works.
It made me uncomfortable; it was so evidently another attempt on his mother's part to secure a rich home for him in England, and his tone did not at all reassure me that, with his easy temper, he would not drift into the arrangement without his heart in it. 'Why should I be so vexed about it? It might be very good for him,' said I to myself.
No, his heart was not in it, for he came back with Harold, and lingered over our fire beyond all reasonable time, talking amusing random stuff, till he had left himself only ten minutes to ride home in to dinner.
The next day Harold and I rode over to Arked together. Dermot was the first person we saw, disporting himself with a pug-dog at the door. 'The fates have sped you well,' said he, as he helped me down from my pony. 'My mother has taken Mrs. Sandford in state to call on Mrs. Vernon, having arranged that Viola and I should conduct the sixty-thousand pounder to admire the tints in the beech woods. The young ladies are putting on their hats. Will it be too far for you, Lucy, to go with us?'
Wherewith he fraternally shouted for 'Vi,' who appeared all in a rosy glow, and took me upstairs to equip me for walking, extracting from me in the meantime the main features of the story of the bloodhound, and trembling while she gave exulting little nods.
Then she called for Nina (were they so intimate already?) and found that young lady in a point device walking dress, nursing the pug and talking to Dermot, and so we set forth for the beech-woods, very soon breaking our five into three and two. Certainly Lady Diana ought to have viewed Dermot's attentions to the sixty-thousand pounder as exemplary, for he engrossed her and me so entirely with the description of Harold's victory over a buck-jumper at Boola Boola, that it was full a quarter of an hour before she looked round to exclaim, 'What is become of Viola?' And then we would not let her wait, and in truth we never came again upon Viola and Harold till we overtook them at the foot of the last hill, and they never could satisfy Miss Sandford where they had been, nor what they had seen, nor how they had missed us; and Dermot invented for the nonce a legend about a fairy in the hill, who made people gyrate round it in utter oblivion of all things; thus successfully diverting the attention of Miss Sandford, who took it all seriously. Yes, she certainly was a stupid girl.
Every moment that lengthened the veritable enchantment of that autumn afternoon was precious beyond what we knew, and we kept Miss Sandford prowling about the garden on all sorts of pretexts, till the poor girl was tired out, as well she might be, for we had kept her on her feet for three hours and a half, and she made her escape at last to join Viola.
I always think of Harold and Viola, as I saw them at that moment, on the top of the western slope of the lawn, so that there was a great ruddy gold sky behind them, against which their silhouettes stood out in a sort of rich dark purple shade.
'Oh, they are looking at such a sunset!' cried Miss Sandford, climbing up the hill.
'Query!' murmured Dermot, for the faces were in profile, not turning towards the sun in the sky, but to the sunbeams in one another's eyes--sunbeams that were still there when we joined them, and, in my recollection, seem to blend with the glorious haze of light that was pouring down in a flood over the purple moorland horizon, and the wood, field, and lake below. I was forced to say something about going home, and Viola took me up to her room, where we had one of those embraces that can never be forgotten. The chief thing that the dear girl said to me was, 'Oh, Lucy. How he has suffered! How shall I ever make it up to him?'
Poor dear Viola, little did she think that she was to cause the very sharpest of his sufferings.
Nay, as little did he, when we rode home together with the still brilliant sky before us. I never see a lane ending in golden light, melting into blue, and dark pine trees framing as it were the brightness, with every little branch defined against it, without thinking of that silence of intense, almost awe-struck joy in which Harold went home by my side, only at long intervals uttering some brief phrase, such as 'This is blessedness,' or 'Thank God, who gives women such hearts.'
He had told her all, and it had but added a reverent, enthusiastic pity and fervour to that admiring love which had been growing up so long, and to which he had set the spark.
His old friend was admitted to share their joy, and was as happy as we were, perhaps doubly so, since he had beheld with despair Harold's early infatuation and its results, which had made him fear, during those three wretched years, that all the lad's great and noble gifts would be lost in the coarse excesses of his wild life, with barbarous prosperity without, and a miserable, hardening home. That he should have been delivered from it, still capable of refinement, still young and fresh enough for a new beginning, had been a cause of great joy, and now that all should be repaired by a true and worthy love, had seemed beyond hope. We built our castles over the fire that evening, Harold had already marked out with his eye the tract of Neme Heath which he would reclaim; and the little he had already set me on doing among the women and children at the potteries, had filled us with schemes as to what Viola was to carry out.
Some misgivings there were even then. Lady Diana was not to be expected to like Harold's L1,200 a year as well as Piggy's heirship to the Erymanth coronet, or any of the other chances that might befall an attractive girl of twenty.
For coldness and difficulties we were prepared, but not for the unqualified refusal with which she met Harold the next morning, grounding all on the vague term, 'circumstances,' preventing his even seeing Viola, and cutting short the interview in the manner of a grande dame whose family had received an insult.
Dermot, however, not only raging, but raving, on his side, assured him of the staunchness of his sister, and her resolve to hold by him through everything; and further, in sundry arguments with his mother, got to the bottom of the 'circumstances.' She had put away from herself the objection to the convict birth and breeding, by being willing to accept Eustace, to whom exactly the same objections applied; and when she called Eustace a man of more education and manners, her son laughed in her face at the comparison of 'that idiot' with a man like Harold.
Then came the 'past life,' a much more tangible objection, but Dermot was ready there, declaring that whatever Harold had done, considering his surroundings, was much less heinous than his own transgressions, after such a bringing up as his, and would his mother say that nobody ought to marry him? Besides, to whom had she given Di? They were not arguments that Lady Diana accepted, but she weakened her own cause by trying to
