“Dear Mrs. Chiley!” said Lucilla, “it is so good of you to care; but if it had been that I was thinking of, I need never have come home at all, you know; and my object in life is just what it has always been, to be a comfort to papa.”
Upon which Mrs. Chiley kissed her young friend once more with lingering meaning. “My dear, I don’t know what They mean,” she said, with indignation; “everybody knows men are great fools where women are concerned—but I never knew what idiots they were till now; and you are too good for them, my darling!” said Mrs. Chiley, with indignant tenderness. Perhaps Miss Marjoribanks was in some respects of the same way of thinking. She conducted her sympathetic friend to the garden door, when it came to be time for everybody to go and dress, with a certain pathetic elevation in her own person, which was not out of accord with Mrs. Chiley’s virtuous wrath. To have Mrs. Mortimer and Barbara Lake preferred to her did not wound Lucilla’s pride—one can be wounded in that way only by one’s equals. She thought of it with a certain mild pity and charitable contempt. Both these two men had had the chance of having her, and this was how they had chosen! And there can be little wonder if Miss Marjoribanks’s compassion for them was mingled with a little friendly and condescending disdain.
It was, however, an ease to Lucilla’s mind that she had let Mrs. Chiley know, and was so far free to work out her plans without any fear of misconception. And on the whole, her old friend’s tender indignation was not disagreeable to her. Thus it was, without any interval of repose to speak of, that her lofty energies went on unwearied to overrule and guide the crisis which was to decide so many people’s fate.
XXXII
Dr. Marjoribanks was not a man to take very much notice of trivial external changes; and he knew Lucilla and her constitution, and, being a medical man, was not perhaps so liable to parental anxieties as an unprofessional father might have been; but even he was a little struck by Miss Marjoribanks’s appearance when he came into the drawing-room. He said, “You are flushed, Lucilla? is anything going to happen?” with the calmness of a man who knew there was not much the matter—but yet he did observe that her colour was not exactly what it always was. “I am quite well, papa, thank you,” said Lucilla, which, to be sure, was a fact the Doctor had never doubted; and then the people began to come in, and there was no more to be said.
But there could be no doubt that Lucilla had more colour than usual. Her pulse was quite steady, and her heart going on at its ordinary rate; but her admirable circulation was nevertheless so far affected, that the ordinary rose-tints of her complexion were all deepened. It was not so distinctly an improvement as it would have been had she been habitually pale; but still the flush was moderate, and did Miss Marjoribanks no harm. And then it was a larger party than usual. The Centums were there, who were General Travers’s chaperons, and so were the Woodburns, and of course Mrs. Chiley, which made up the number of ladies beyond what was general at Dr. Marjoribanks’s table. Lucilla received all her guests with the sweetest smiles and all her ordinary ease and self-possession, but at the same time her mind was not free from some excitement. She was on the eve of a crisis which would be the greatest failure or the greatest success of her public life, and naturally she anticipated it with a certain emotion.
Mr. Cavendish, for his part, had sufficient sense to come very early, and to get into a dark corner and keep himself out of the way; for though he was screwed up to the emergency, his self-possession was nothing to that of Lucilla. But on the whole, it was perhaps Mrs. Woodburn who suffered the most. Her heightened colour was more conspicuous than that of Miss Marjoribanks, because as a general rule she was pale. She was pale, almost white, and had dark eyes and dark hair, and possessed precisely all the accessories which make a sudden change of complexion remarkable; and the effect this evening was so evident that even her husband admired her for a moment, and then stopped short to inquire, “By George! had she begun to paint?” to which question Mrs. Woodburn naturally replied only by an indignant shrug of her white shoulders and aversion of her head. She would not have been sorry, perhaps, for this night only, if he had believed that it was rouge, and not emotion. Of all the people at Dr. Marjoribanks’s table, she perhaps was the only one really to be pitied. Even Mr. Cavendish, if vanquished, would at the most receive only the recompense of his deeds, and could go away and begin over again somewhere else, or bury himself in the great depths of general society, where nobody would be the wiser; but as for his sister, she could not go away. The first result for her would be to give the master to whom she belonged, and for whom she had, with some affection, a great deal of not unnatural contempt, a cruel and overwhelming power over her; and she knew, poor soul, that he was not at all too generous or delicate to make use of such a power. In such a case she would be bound to the rock, like a kind of hapless Andromeda, to be pecked at by all the birds and blown at by all the winds, not to speak of the devouring monster from whom no hero could ever deliver her; and with all these horrible consequences before her eyes, she had
