Belchamber by Howard Overing Sturgis

Author:Howard Overing Sturgis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barakaldo Books
Published: 2020-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XIV

IT was natural that with other people in the house Sainty should see less of Cissy; he told himself so several times a day, yet the thought was not altogether a pleasant one that she only welcomed his society as a refuge from solitude or Lady Eccleston. The frost had put a stop to the works in front of the house, and a bad chill and sharp attack of neuralgia warned Sainty to discontinue his drives until milder weather. Skating on the big pond became the amusement of the moment, a pastime in which his lameness prevented his joining. Gerald Newby, in a straw hat, spent hours upon the ice, and fell down with Spartan perseverance in his determination to accomplish figures of eight.

‘Why is it a necessary part of the make-up of the good young man to wear a straw hat in the winter?’ Claude asked; ‘I notice that serious youths always do, curates and schoolmasters. Is it a mark of asceticism, as being obviously not the comfortable thing to do, or to give the impression that their brains are overheated with excess of thought?’

Claude, who skated, as he did everything else that he attempted, with elegance and precision, had undertaken to instruct Cissy in the art, and Sainty had to watch them gliding about together, both her hands tightly clasped in his, and even a sustaining arm occasionally flung out when the maiden was more than usually wobbly. It was all perfectly natural; there was not the smallest ground for objecting. Lady Susan Trafford and her sons, Claude’s mother, Newby, and Cissy’s three brothers were all on the ice the whole time; the pond, though a good-sized sheet of water, was visible from end to end; there were no corners or islands behind which the flirtatiously-inclined could disappear; yet the sight of those perpetually clasped hands became a constant irritation to Belchamber, and it was quite vain for him to reiterate that with her mother and brothers in the house, it was less than no business of his how Miss Eccleston amused herself. ‘Had it been anyone else but Claude,’ he thought, ‘he should not have minded.’

It soon became evident to him that he was not alone in the apprehension with which he watched the growing intimacy between Cissy and his cousin. Lady Eccleston, it was plain, viewed it with quite as little favour as he did. Swathed in furs, and with a blue nose, the poor lady fluttered on the bank, in a manner strongly suggestive of a hen whose ducklings have taken to the water. One day, having invited him to take her for a walk, while the hoar frost crackled under their feet in the winding mazes of the shrubbery, she quite unexpectedly unburthened herself to him on the subject.

‘I can talk to you, dear Lord Belchamber,’ she said, ‘as I would to an older man; you are so good, so pure, so unlike the others, and I am so sorely in need of advice.

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