A Charming Fellow Volume Iii Part 10

"Well, I don't wish to use an offensive phrase. You will write to oblige me. It has been put off long enough."

"Why should I oblige you?" said Castalia, looking up at him with sunken eyes. She looked so ill and haggard, as to arrest Algernon's attention--not too lavishly bestowed on her in general.

"Ca.s.sy," said he, "I am afraid you are not well!"

The tears came into her eyes. She turned her head away. "Do you really care whether I am ill or well?" she asked.

"Do I really care? What a question! Of course I care. Are you suffering?"

"N--no; not now. I believe I should not feel any suffering if you only loved me, Ancram."

"Castalia! How can you be so absurd?"

He rose from his seat beside her, and walked impatiently up and down the room. Nothing irritated him so much as to be called on for sentiment or tenderness.

"There!" she exclaimed, with a little despondent gesture of the head, "you were speaking and looking kindly, and I have driven you away! I wish I was dead."

Algernon stopped in his walk, and cast a singular look at his wife. Then after a moment he said, in his usual light manner, "My dear Ca.s.sy, you are low and nervous. It really is not good for you to mope by yourself as you do. Come, rouse yourself to write this letter to my lord, then after dinner you can have the fly to drive to my mother's. She complains that she sees you very seldom."

"Will you come too, Ancram?"

"I----well, yes; if it is possible, I will come too."

"I think," said Castalia, putting her hands on his shoulders, and gazing wistfully into his face, "that if you and I could go away to some quiet strange place--far away from all these odious people--across the seas somewhere--I think we might be happy even now."

"Upon my honour, there's nothing I should like so much as to get away across the seas! And you might as well hint to my lord, in the course of your letter, that I should be very well contented with a berth in the Colonies. A good climate, of course! One wouldn't care to be s.h.i.+pped off to Sierra Leone!"

"I will write that to Uncle Val, willingly. But--don't ask me to beg money of him again."

Algernon made a rapid calculation in his mind, and answered without appreciable pause, "Well, Ca.s.sy, it shall be as you will. But as to begging----that, I think, is scarcely the word between us and Lord Seely."

"I'll run upstairs and bathe my eyes, and I shall still have time to write before dinner," said Castalia, and left the room.

When he was alone, Algernon opened the writing-table drawer, and glanced at the papers in it. Castalia's hurried manner of concealing them had suggested to his mind the suspicion that she might have been writing secretly to her uncle. He found no letter addressed to Lord Seely, but he did find an unfinished fragment of writing addressed to himself. It consisted of a few incoherent phrases of despondency and reproach--the expression of confidence betrayed and affection unrequited. There was a word or two in it about the writer's weariness of life and desire to quit it.

Castalia had written many such fragments of late; sometimes as a mere outlet for suppressed feeling, sometimes under the impression that she really could not long support an existence uncheered by sympathy or counsel, embittered by jealousy, and chilled by neglect. She had written such fragments, and then torn them up in many a lonely hour, but she had never thought of complaining of Algernon to Lord Seely. She would complain of him to no human being. But all Algernon's insight into his wife's character did not enable him to feel sure of this. Indeed, he had often said to himself that no rational being could be expected to follow the vagaries of Castalia's sickly fancies and impracticable temper. He would not have been surprised to find her pouring out a long string of lamentations about her lot to Lord Seely. He was not much surprised at what he did find her to have written, although the state of feeling it displayed seemed to him as unreasonable and unaccountable as ever. He gave himself no account of the motive which made him take the fragment of writing, fold it, and place it carefully inside a little pocket-book which he carried.

"I wonder," he thought to himself, "if Castalia is likely to die!"

CHAPTER IX.

The letter to Lord Seely was duly written, and this time in Castalia's own words. Algernon refused to a.s.sist her in the composition of it, saying, in answer to her appeals, "No, no, Ca.s.sy; I shall make no suggestion whatsoever. I don't choose to expose myself to any more grandiloquence from your uncle about letters being 'written by your hand, but not dictated by your head.' I wonder at my lord talking such high-flown stuff. But pomposity is his master weakness."

Castalia's letter was as follows:

"Whitford, November 23rd.

"DEAR UNCLE VAL,--I am sure you will understand that I was very much surprised and hurt at the tone of your last letter to Ancram. Of course, if you have not the money to help us with, you cannot lend it. And I don't complain of that. But I was vexed at the way you wrote to Ancram. You won't think me ungrateful to you. I know how good you have always been to me, and I am fonder of you than of anybody in the world except Ancram. But n.o.body can be unkind to him without hurting me, and I shall always resent any slight to him. But I am writing now to ask you something that 'I wish for very much myself;' it is quite my own desire. I am not at all happy in this place. And I want you to get Ancram a berth somewhere in the Colonies, quite away. It is no use changing from one town in England to another. What we want is to get 'far away,' and put the seas between us and all the odious people here. I am sure you might get us something if you would try. I a.s.sure you Ancram is perfectly wasted in this hole. Any stupid grocer or tallow-chandler could do what he has to do. Do, dear Uncle Val, try to help us in this. Indeed I shall never be happy in Whitford.--Your affectionate niece,

"C. ERRINGTON.

"Give my love to Aunt Belinda if she cares to have it. But I daresay she won't.--C. E."

"I think my lord will not doubt the genuineness of that epistle!"

thought Algernon, after having read it at his wife's request.

Then the fly was announced, and they set off together to pa.s.s the evening at the elder Mrs. Errington's lodgings. The "Blue Bell" driver touched his hat in a very respectful manner. His master's long-standing account was unpaid, but he continued to receive, for his part, frequent half-crowns from Algernon, who liked the immediate popularity to be purchased by a gift somewhat out of proportion to his means. Indeed, our young friend enjoyed a better reputation amongst menials and underlings than amongst their employers. The former were apt to speak of him as a pleasant gentleman who was free with his money; and to declare that they felt as if they could do anything for young Mr. Errington, so they could! He had such a way with him! Whereas the mere payment of humdrum debts excites no such agreeable glow of feeling, and is altogether a flat, stale, and unprofitable proceeding.

"What o'clock shall we say, Castalia?" asked her husband, as they alighted at Mrs. Thimbleby's door.

"Tell him to come at half-past ten," returned Castalia.

It chanced that David Powell was re-entering his lodgings at the moment the younger Erringtons reached the door. He stood aside to let the lady pa.s.s into the house before him, and thus heard her answer. The sound of her voice made him start and bend forward to look at her face when the light from the open door fell upon it. She turned round at the same instant, and the two looked full at each other. David Powell asked Mrs.

Thimbleby if that lady were not the wife of Mr. Algernon Errington.

"Yes, Mr. Powell, she is his wife; and more's the pity, if all tales be true!"

"Judge not uncharitably, sister Thimbleby! Nor let your tongue belie the gentleness of your spirit. It is an unruly member that speaks not always out of the fulness of the heart. The lady seems very sick, and bears the traces of much sorrow on her countenance."

"Oh yes, indeed, poor thing! Sickly enough she looks, and sorry. Nay, I daresay she has her own trials, but I fear me she leads that pleasant young husband of hers a poor life of it. I shouldn't say as much to anyone but you, sir, for I do try to keep my tongue from evil-speaking.

But had you never seen her before, Mr. Powell?"

Powell answered musingly, "N--no--scarcely seen her. But I had heard her voice."

Mrs. Errington received her son and daughter-in-law with an effusive welcome. She was so astonished; so delighted. It was so long since she had seen them. And then to see them together! That had latterly become quite a rare treat. The good lady expatiated on this theme until Castalia's brow grew gloomy with the recollection of her wrongs, her solitary hours spent so drearily, and her suspicions as to how her husband employed the hours of his absence from her. And then Mrs.

Errington began playfully to reprove her for being dull and silent, instead of enjoying dear Algy's society now that she had it! "I am sure, my dear Castalia," said the elder lady with her usual self-complacent stateliness, "you won't mind my telling you that I consider one of the great secrets of the perfect felicity I enjoyed during my married life to have been the interest and pleasure I always took--and showed that I took--in Dr. Errington's society."

"Perhaps he liked your society," returned Castalia with a languid sneer, followed by a short bitter sigh.

"Preferred it to any in the world, my dear!" said Mrs. Errington, mellifluously. She said it, too, with an _aplomb_ and an air of conviction that mightily tickled Algernon, who, remembering the family rumours which haunted his childhood, thought that his respected father, if he preferred his wife's society to any other, must have put a considerable constraint on his inclinations, not to say sacrificed them altogether to the claims of a convivial circle of friends. "The dear old lady is as good as a play!" thought he. Indeed, he thoroughly relished this bit of domestic comedy.

"But then," proceeded Mrs. Errington, as she rang the bell to order tea, "I have not the vanity to suppose that he would have done so without the exercise of some little care and tact on my part. Tact, my dear Castalia--tact is the most precious gift a wife can bring to the domestic circle. But the Ancrams always had enormous tact--Give us some tea, if you please, Mrs. Thimbleby, and be careful that the water boils--proverbial for it, in fact!"

Algernon thought it time to come to the rescue. He did not choose his comfort to be destroyed by a pa.s.sage of arms between his mother and his wife, so he deftly turned the conversation to less dangerous topics, and things proceeded peacefully until the tea was served.

"Who was that man that was coming in to the house with us?" asked Castalia, as she sipped her tea from one of Mrs. Errington's antique blue and white china cups.

"Would it be Mr. Diamond----? But no; you know him by sight. Or--oh, I suppose it was that Methodist preacher, Powell!"

"Powell! Yes, that was the name--David Powell."

"Most likely. He is in and out at all hours. Really, Algernon, do you know--you remember the fellow, how he used to annoy us at Maxfield's.

Well, do you know, I believe he is quite crazy!"