“I don’t see why anyone should cry,” said Lucilla. “I think he makes a great deal too much of that; he might have come ever so many years ago if he had liked. Poor Mr. Chiltern did not banish him, poor old man!—he might have been here for years.”
Upon which the Colonel himself drew a little nearer, and poked the fire. “I am glad to see you are so sensible, Lucilla,” he said. “It’s the first rational word I have heard on the subject. She thinks he’s a kind of saint and martyr; a silly young fellow that runs off among a set of Frenchmen because he can’t get everything his own way—and then he expects that we are all to go into transports of joy, and give him our votes,” Colonel Chiley added, smashing a great piece of coal with the poker, with a blow full of energy, yet showing a slight unsteadiness in it, which sent a host of blazing splinters into the hearth. He was a man who wore very well, but he was not so steady as he once was, and nowadays was apt, by some tremulous movement, to neutralise the strength which he had left.
Mrs. Chiley, for her part, was apt to be made very nervous by her husband’s proceedings. She was possessed by a terror that the splinters some day would jump out of the hearth on to the carpet and fly into the corners, “and perhaps burn us all up in our beds,” as she said. She gave a little start among her cushions, and stooped down to look over the floor. “He will never learn that he is old,” she said in Lucilla’s ear, who instantly came to her side to see what she wanted; and thus the two old people kept watch upon each other, and noted, with a curious mixture of vexation and sympathy, each other’s declining strength.
“For my part, I would give him all my votes, if I had a hundred,” said Mrs. Chiley, “and so will you, too, when you hear the rights of it. Lucilla, my dear, tell him—I hope you are not going to forsake old friends.”
“No,” said Miss Marjoribanks—but she spoke with a gravity and hesitation which did not fail to reach Mrs. Chiley’s ear—“I hope I shall never desert my old friends; but I think all the same that it is Mr. Ashburton who is the right man for Carlingford,” she said slowly. She said it with reluctance, for she knew it would shock her audience, but, at the same time, she did not shrink from her duty; and the moment had now arrived when Lucilla felt concealment was impossible, and that the truth must be said.
As for Mrs. Chiley, she was so distressed that the tears came to her eyes; and even the Colonel laughed, and did not understand it. Colonel Chiley, though he was by no means as yet on Mr. Cavendish’s side, was not any more capable than his neighbours of understanding Miss Marjoribanks’s single-minded devotion to what was just and right; and why she should transfer her support to Ashburton, who was not a ladies’ man, nor, in the Colonel’s opinion, a marrying man, nor anything at all attractive, now that the other had come back romantic and repentant to throw his honours at her feet, was beyond his power of explanation. He contented himself with saying “humph”; but his wife was not so easily satisfied. She took Lucilla by the hand and poured forth a flood of remonstrances and prayers.
“I do not understand you, Lucilla,” said Mrs. Chiley. “He whom we know so little about—whom, I am sure, you have no reason to care for. And where could you find anybody nicer than Mr. Cavendish?—and he to have such faith in us, and to come rushing back as soon as he was able. I am sure you have not taken everything into consideration, Lucilla. He might not perhaps do exactly as could have been wished before he went away; but he was young and he was led astray; and I do think you were a little hard upon him, my dear; but I have always said I never knew anybody nicer than Mr. Cavendish. And what possible reason you can have to care about that other man—”
“It was like a special Intimation,” said Lucilla, with solemnity. “I don’t see how I could neglect it, for my part. The day the news came about poor old Mr. Chiltern’s death I was out, you know, and heard it; and just at one spot upon the pavement, opposite Mr. Holden’s, it came into my mind like a flash of lightning that Mr. Ashburton was the man. I don’t care in the least for him, and I had not been thinking of him, or anything. It came into my head all in a moment. If I had been very intimate with poor dear old Mr. Chiltern, or if I believed in spirit-rapping, I should think it was a message from him.”
Lucilla spoke with great gravity, but she did not impress her audience, who were people of sceptical minds. Mrs. Chiley, for her part, was almost angry, and could scarcely forgive Lucilla for having made her give grave attention to such a piece of nonsense. “If it had been him,” she said, with some wrath, “I don’t see how having been dead for a few hours should make his advice worth having. It never was good for anything when he was alive. And you don’t believe in spirit-rapping, I hope. I wonder how you can talk such nonsense,” the old lady said severely. And Colonel
