about to do? Rose had wedded her noble nature to him, and it was as much her spirit as his own that urged him thus to forfeit her, to be worthy of her by assuming unworthiness. There he sat, neither conning over his determination nor the cause for it, revolving Rose’s words about Laxley, and nothing else. The words were so sweet and so bitter; every now and then the heavy smiting on his heart set it quivering and leaping, as the whip starts a jaded horse.
Meantime the Countess was participating in a witty conversation in the drawing-room with Sir John and the Duke, Miss Current, and others; and it was not till after she had displayed many graces, and, as one or two ladies presumed to consider, marked effrontery, that she rose and drew Caroline away with her. Returning to her dressing-room, she found that Evan had faithfully kept his engagement; he was on the exact spot where she had left him.
Caroline came to him swiftly, and put her hand to his forehead that she might the better peruse his features, saying in her mellow caressing voice: “What is this, dear Van, that you will do? Why do you look so wretched?”
“Has not Louisa told you?”
“She has told me something, dear, but I don’t know what it is. That you are going to expose us? What further exposure do we need? I’m sure, Van, my pride—what I had—is gone. I have none left!”
Evan kissed her brows warmly. An explanation, full of the Countess’s passionate outcries of justification, necessity, and innocence in higher than fleshly eyes, was given, and then the three were silent.
“But, Van,” Caroline commenced, deprecatingly, “my darling! of what use—now! Whether right or wrong, why should you, why should you, when the thing is done, dear?—think!”
“And you, too, would let another suffer under an unjust accusation?” said Evan.
“But, dearest, it is surely your duty to think of your family first. Have we not been afflicted enough? Why should you lay us under this fresh burden?”
“Because it’s better to bear all now than a life of remorse,” answered Evan.
“But this Mr. Laxley—I cannot pity him; he has behaved so insolently to you throughout! Let him suffer.”
“Lady Jocelyn,” said Evan, “has been unintentionally unjust to him, and after her kindness—apart from the right or wrong—I will not—I can’t allow her to continue so.”
“After her kindness!” echoed the Countess, who had been fuming at Caroline’s weak expostulations. “Kindness! Have I not done ten times for these Jocelyns what they have done for us? O mon Dieu! why, I have bestowed on them the membership for Fallowfield: I have saved her from being a convicted liar this very day. Worse! for what would have been talked of the morals of the house, supposing the scandal. Oh! indeed I was tempted to bring that horrid mad Captain into the house face to face with his flighty doll of a wife, as I, perhaps, should have done, acting by the dictates of my conscience. I lied for Lady Jocelyn, and handed the man to a lawyer, who withdrew him. And this they owe to me! Kindness? They have given us bed and board, as the people say. I have repaid them for that.”
“Pray be silent, Louisa,” said Evan, getting up hastily, for the sick sensation Rose had experienced came over him. His sister’s plots, her untruth, her coarseness, clung to him and seemed part of his blood. He now had a personal desire to cut himself loose from the wretched entanglement revealed to him, whatever it cost.
“Are you really, truly going?” Caroline exclaimed, for he was near the door.
“At a quarter to twelve at night!” sneered the Countess, still imagining that he, like herself, must be partly acting.
“But, Van, is it—dearest, think! is it manly for a brother to go and tell of his sister? And how would it look?”
Evan smiled. “Is it that that makes you unhappy? Louisa’s name will not be mentioned—be sure of that.”
Caroline was stooping forward to him. Her figure straightened: “Good Heaven, Evan! you are not going to take it on yourself? Rose!—she will hate you.”
“God help me!” he cried internally.
“Oh, Evan, darling! consider, reflect!” She fell on her knees, catching his hand. “It is worse for us that you should suffer, dearest! Think of the dreadful meanness and baseness of what you will have to acknowledge.”
“Yes!” sighed the youth, and his eyes, in his extreme pain, turned to the Countess reproachfully.
“Think, dear,” Caroline hurried on, “he gains nothing for whom you do this—you lose all. It is not your deed. You will have to speak an untruth. Your ideas are wrong—wrong, I know they are. You will have to lie. But if you are silent, the little, little blame that may attach to us will pass away, and we shall be happy in seeing our brother happy.”
“You are talking to Evan as if he had religion,” said the Countess, with steady sedateness. And at that moment, from the sublimity of his pagan virtue, the young man groaned for some pure certain light to guide him: the question whether he was about to do right made him weak. He took Caroline’s head between his two hands, and kissed her mouth. The act brought Rose to his senses insufferably, and she—his goddess of truth and his sole guiding light—spurred him afresh.
“The dishonour of my family, Caroline, is mine, and on me the public burden of it rests. Say nothing more—don’t think of me. I will not be moved from what I have resolved. I go to Lady Jocelyn to-night. To-morrow we leave, and there’s the end. Louisa, if you have any new schemes for my welfare, I beg you to renounce them.”
“Gratitude I never expected from a Dawley!” the Countess retorted.
“Oh, Louisa! he is going!” cried Caroline; “kneel to him with me: stop him: Rose loves him, and he is going to make her hate him.”
“You can’t talk reason to one who’s mad,” said the Countess, more like the Dawley she