“Perhaps I can guess it,” she said.
“But I will not try. I will not even think
of it.”
“The cause, whatever it be, has been full of
sorrow to me. I would have given my left hand
to have been at Loughlinter this autumn.”
“I should have been staying there with you,”
he said. He paused, and for a moment there was
no word spoken by either of them; but he could perceive
that the hand in which she held her whip was playing
with her horse’s mane with a nervous movement.
“When I found how it must be, and that I must
miss you, I rushed down here that I might see you
for a moment. And now I am here I do not dare
to speak to you of myself.” They were now
beyond the rocks, and Violet, without speaking a word,
again put her horse into a trot. He was by her
side in a moment, but he could not see her face.
“Have you not a word to say to me?” he
asked.
“No;—no;—no;” she
replied, “not a word when you speak to me like
that. There is the carriage. Come;—we
will join them.” Then she cantered on,
and he followed her till they reached the Earl and
Lady Baldock and Miss Boreham. “I have
done my devotions now,” said Miss Effingham,
“and am ready to return to ordinary life.”
Phineas could not find another moment in which to
speak to her. Though he spent the evening with
her, and stood over her as she sang at the Earl’s
request, and pressed her hand as she went to bed, and
was up to see her start in the morning, he could not
draw from her either a word or a look.
Phineas Finn went to Ireland immediately after his
return from Saulsby, having said nothing further to
Violet Effingham, and having heard nothing further
from her than what is recorded in the last chapter.
He felt very keenly that his position was unsatisfactory,
and brooded over it all the autumn and early winter;
but he could form no plan for improving it. A
dozen times he thought of writing to Miss Effingham,
and asking for an explicit answer. He could not,
however, bring himself to write the letter, thinking
that written expressions of love are always weak and
vapid,—and deterred also by a conviction
that Violet, if driven to reply in writing, would
undoubtedly reply by a refusal. Fifty times he
rode again in his imagination his ride in Saulsby
Wood, and he told himself as often that the syren’s
answer to him,—her no, no, no,—had
been, of all possible answers, the most indefinite
and provoking. The tone of her voice as she galloped
away from him, the bearing of her countenance when
he rejoined her, her manner to him when he saw her
start from the Castle in the morning, all forbade
him to believe that his words to her had been taken
as an offence. She had replied to him with a
direct negative, simply with the word “no;”
but she had so said it that there had hardly been
any sting in the no; and he had known at the moment
that whatever might be the result of his suit, he need
not regard Violet Effingham as his enemy.
