Rossmoyne. Duchess

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      CHAPTER I

      The old-fashioned clock is ticking loudly, ponderously, as though determined to betray the flight of fickle time and impress upon the happy, careless ones that the end of all things is at hand. The roses knock their fragrant buds against the window-panes, calling attention to their dainty sweetness. The pigeons coo amorously upon the sills outside, and even thrust their pretty heads into the breakfast-room, demanding plaintively their daily crumbs; but no one heeds.

      A deadly silence has fallen upon this room at Moyne, albeit life is fully represented here, and two eyes, in which the light of youth is quenched, are looking anxiously into the two other eyes that have also seen the best and the sweetest of their days.

      Hopelessly the golden roses scatter their petals. In vain the white and tawny birds entreat backsheesh. To no purpose does the elderly clock count out its numbers. The urn is hissing angrily, the two cups of tea so carefully prepared are growing cold. So are the crisp little hot cakes, so is the —

      No! by the bye, it isn't! Honey can't. What a chance I was near giving the reviewers!

      One bird, growing annoyed at the prolonged quiet, flies from the open window to the back of Miss Penelope's chair, and settles there with an indignant flutter and a suppressed but angry note. This small suggestion of a living world destroyes the spell that for the last few minutes has been connecting the brain with a dead one.

      Miss Penelope, raising her head, gives words to her thoughts.

      "Poor, poor Katherine!" she says, gently smoothing out the letter that lies upon her knee. "How her happiness was wrecked and what a sad ending there has been to everything! Her children coming home to us, fatherless – motherless! Dear child! what a life hers has been! It is quite twenty years ago now, and yet it all seems to me as fresh as yesterday."

      "She shouldn't have taken things so easily; she should have asserted herself at the time," says Miss Priscilla, whose voice is always a note sharper than her sister's.

      "It requires a great deal of thought and – and a great deal of moral courage to assert one's self when a man has behaved abominably to one, – has, in fact, jilted one!" says Miss Penelope, bringing out the awful word with a little shudder and a shake of her gentle head, that sets two pale lavender ribbons on her cap swaying mildly to and fro.

      "Why was she so fatally silent about everything, except the one bare fact of his refusal, at the last moment, to marry her, without assigning any cause for his base desertion? Why didn't she open her whole heart to me? I wasn't afraid of the man!" says Miss Priscilla, with such terrible energy and such a warlike front as might well have daunted "the man," or indeed any man, could he have seen her. "She should have unburdened her poor bruised spirit to me, who – if my mother was not hers, and if I was many years her senior – had at least a sister's love for her."

      "A true love," says Miss Penelope, with another sigh.

      "Instead of which," regretfully, "she hid all her sorrows in her own bosom, and no doubt wept and pined for the miscreant in secret."

      "Poor soul!" says Miss Penelope, profoundly affected by this dismal picture. Tears born of tenderness spring to her eyes. "Do you remember, Priscilla, how she refused to show his letter, wishing, I suppose, even then to spare him?"

      "I forget nothing!" with some acerbity. "Often, when saying my prayers, I have wished I could forget him, but I can't, so I have to go on being uncharitable and in sin, – if indeed sin it be to harden one's heart against a bad man."

      "Do you remember, too, my dear Priscilla, how she refused to go to church the Sunday after she received his cold-blooded missive telling her he wished his engagement at an end? I often wonder in what language he could have couched such a scandalous desire; but she tore the letter up. Dear! dear! it might have happened to-day, it is all so clear to me."

      "Too clear," says Miss Priscilla.

      "I recollect, too," says Miss Penelope, leaning her elbows on the table, pushing her untasted tea from her, and warming to the dismal memory, "how she would not come down to dinner on that eventful evening, though we had the red-currant tart she was so fond of, and how I took some up myself and knocked at her door and entreated her to open to me and to eat some of it. There was whipped cream on it; and she was very fond of cream, too."

      "And she refused to open the door?" asks Miss Priscilla, with the satisfied air of one who has often heard the thrilling recital before, yet was never tired of it.

      "Absolutely! so I laid the plate on a little table outside her door. Some hours afterwards, going up to bed, I saw the plate was gone and her door slightly ajar. Stealing into her room on tiptoe, I saw she was sleeping peacefully, and that she had eaten the red-currant tart. I felt so happy then. Poor dear child! how fond she was of that tart."

      "She liked everything that had sugar in it," says Miss Priscilla, mournfully.

      "It was only natural. 'Sweets to the sweet,'" says Miss Penelope, letting one little white jewelled hand fall slowly, sadly upon the other.

      There is a lengthened pause.

      Presently, stooping slightly towards her sister, Miss Penelope says in a mysterious whisper, —

      "I wonder, my dear Priscilla, why she married James Beresford a month afterwards."

      "Who can read the human heart? Perhaps it was pride drove her into that marriage, – a desire to show George Desmond how lightly she treated his desertion of her. And James was a handsome young fellow, whereas George was – "

      "Ugly," says Miss Penelope, with quite an amazing amount of vicious satisfaction for her.

      "Strikingly so," says Miss Priscilla, acquiescing most agreeably. "But then the Desmond estates mean half the county; and we used to think he was the soul of honor."

      "It was our father's expressed desire upon his deathbed that Katherine should marry him."

      "Yes, yes; a desire to be held sacred. And Katherine gave her promise to our dying parent. Nothing," says Miss Priscilla, in a solemn tone, "should induce any one to break such an oath. I have often said so to the dear child. But she appeared not only willing, but anxious, to marry George Desmond. His was the traitorous mind."

      "I daresay he has had his own punishment," says Miss Penelope, mildly.

      "I hope so," says Miss Priscilla, sternly. Then, with a return to sadness, "Twenty years ago it is, and now she has been a twelvemonth dead and in her quiet grave."

      "Oh, don't, my dear Priscilla," says Miss Penelope, in a broken voice, burying her face in her pocket-handkerchief.

      "Ah! well, well, we had better look to the future; the past has no charms for us," says Miss Priscilla, with a ghastly attempt at cheerfulness. "Let me see," referring through a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles to the letter in her hand: "That the dear children have landed we know, and – h'm – yes, this very – yes, plainly, very respectable person, the captain, writes to say they will be with us to-morrow."

      "To-morrow! and that was written yesterday," says Miss Penelope, putting down her handkerchief and starting once more into life. "Why, at that rate, my dear Priscilla, they will be here to-day!"

      "Bless me! you don't mean it!" exclaims Miss Priscilla, again applying her glasses to the letter. СКАЧАТЬ