The Prince of the Captivity: The Epilogue to a Romance
Sydney C. Grier
9781465662750
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
There were only a few passengers by the South Wales Express, and to one young man in a first-class carriage the fact was very welcome. He had bought a paper almost unconsciously from the boy who came to the window, but it did him good service as a shield, from behind which he could cast suspicious and hostile glances, after the manner of the travelling Briton, at any one who seemed inclined to disturb his solitude, as long as the train was in the station. But when once the dreary and dirty buff brick surroundings of the terminus had been left behind, the paper fell to the floor, and Lord Usk gazed out of the window with an expression which seemed too ecstatic to be evoked even by the busy harvest-fields and the nursery-gardens full of asters and late roses on which his bodily eyes were resting. And indeed the scene before him might still have been a brick-and-mortar desert for all that he saw of it. His mental gaze was fixed upon the face of Miss Félicia J. Steinherz, the sight of which had changed the whole course of his life. Could it really be the case, he was wondering, that a month ago he had never seen Félicia Steinherz? Yes, it was perfectly true, and the curious thing was that though he now saw clearly that life must have been a howling wilderness in those days, it had not seemed so at the time. He had been fairly satisfied with himself and his prospects, and quite unconscious that the world was in reality empty and out of joint. It was with a scornful pity that he looked back from his vantage-point of to-day upon the Usk of a month ago. She was breathing the same air with him then, and yet he had not so much as guessed at her existence, nor even been conscious of a blank without her! Ah, but he had; for was she not the fulfilment of all his dreams, the realisation of the ideal of womanhood which had haunted him from his boyish days? Here and there, in one woman or another, he had caught, as it seemed, glimpses of this ideal, but closer acquaintance dispelled the illusion. The woman of his dreams still eluded him tantalisingly—until he met Félicia. He did not ask himself whether she corresponded in all respects with his mental picture; it was enough that she was herself.
