IN WHICH WE HAVE TO SEE IN THE DARK

So ends the fourth act of our comedy.

After all her heroism and extraordinary efforts, after, as she feared, offending Providence—­after facing Tailordom—­the Countess was rolled away in a dingy fly unrewarded even by a penny, for what she had gone through.  For she possessed eminently the practical nature of her sex; and though she would have scorned, and would have declined to handle coin so base, its absence was upbraidingly mentioned in her spiritual outcries.  Not a penny!

Nor was there, as in the miseries of retreat she affected indifferently to imagine, a Duke fished out of the ruins of her enterprise, to wash the mud off her garments and edge them with radiance.  Caroline, it became clear to her, had been infected by Evan’s folly.  Caroline, she subsequently learnt, had likewise been a fool.  Instead of marvelling at the genius that had done so much in spite of the pair of fools that were the right and left wing of her battle array, the simple-minded lady wept.  She wanted success, not genius.  Admiration she was ever ready to forfeit for success.

Nor did she say to the tailors of earth:  ’Weep, for I sought to emancipate you from opprobrium by making one of you a gentleman; I fought for a great principle and have failed.’  Heroic to the end, she herself shed all the tears; took all the sorrow

Where was consolation?  Would any Protestant clergyman administer comfort to her?  Could he? might he do so?  He might listen, and quote texts; but he would demand the harsh rude English for everything; and the Countess’s confessional thoughts were all innuendoish, aerial; too delicate to live in our shameless tongue.  Confession by implication, and absolution; she could know this to be what she wished for, and yet not think it.  She could see a haven of peace in that picture of the little brown box with the sleekly reverend figure bending his ear to the kneeling Beauty outside, thrice ravishing as she half-lifts the veil of her sins and her visage!—­yet she started alarmed to hear it whispered that the fair penitent was the Countess de Saldar; urgently she prayed that no disgraceful brother might ever drive her to that!

Never let it be a Catholic priest!—­she almost fashioned her petition into words.  Who was to save her?  Alas! alas! in her dire distress—­ in her sense of miserable pennilessness, she clung to Mr. John Raikes, of the curricle, the mysteriously rich young gentleman; and on that picture, with Andrew roguishly contemplating it, and Evan, with feelings regarding his sister that he liked not to own, the curtain commiseratingly drops.

As in the course of a stream you come upon certain dips, where, but here and there, a sparkle or a gloom of the full flowing water is caught through deepening foliage, so the history that concerns us wanders out of day for a time, and we must violate the post and open written leaves to mark the turn it takes.