“People act on that mania sometimes, I believe. Do you think it an outrage on decency for a wife to run away from a mad husband whom they won’t shut up, and take shelter with a friend? Is that the cause? Mr. Forth is an old friend of mine. I would trust my daughter with him in a desert, and stake my hand on his honour.”
“Oh, Lady Jocelyn!” cried Evan. “Would to God you might ever have said that of me! Madam, I love you. I shall never see you again. I shall never meet one to treat me so generously. I leave you, blackened in character—you cannot think of me without contempt. I can never hope that this will change. But, for your kindness let me thank you.”
And as speech is poor where emotion is extreme—and he knew his own to be especially so—he took her hand with petitioning eyes, and dropping on one knee, reverentially kissed it.
Lady Jocelyn was human enough to like to be appreciated. She was a veteran Pagan, and may have had the instinct that a peculiar virtue in this young one was the spring of his conduct. She stood up and said: “Don’t forget that you have a friend here.”
The poor youth had to turn his head from her.
“You wish that I should tell Rose what you have told me, at once, Mr. Harrington?”
“Yes, madam; I beg that you will do so.”
“Well!”
And the queer look Lady Jocelyn had been wearing dimpled into absolute wonder. A stranger to Love’s cunning, she marvelled why he should desire to witness the scorn Rose would feel for him.
“If she’s not asleep, then, she shall hear it now,” said her ladyship. “You understand that it will be mentioned to no other person.”
“Except to Mr. Laxley, madam, to whom I shall offer the satisfaction he may require. But I will undertake that.”
“Just as you think proper on that matter,” remarked her philosophical ladyship, who held that man was a fighting animal and must not have his nature repressed.
She lighted him part of the way, and then turned off to Rose’s chamber.
Would Rose believe it of him? Love combated his dismal foreboding. Strangely, too, now that he had plunged into his pitch-bath, the guilt seemed to cling to him, and instead of hoping serenely, or fearing steadily, his spirit fell in a kind of abject supplication to Rose, and blindly trusted that she would still love even if she believed him base. In his weakness he fell so low as to pray that she might love that crawling reptile who could creep into a house and shrink from no vileness to win her.
CHAPTER XXXV. ROSE WOUNDED.
The light of morning was yet cold along the passages of the house when Polly Wheedle, hurrying to her young mistress, met her loosely dressed and with a troubled face.
“What’s the matter, Polly? I was coming to you?”
“O, Miss Rose! and I was coming to you. Miss Bonner’s gone back to her convulsions again. She’s had them all night. Her hair won’t last till thirty, if she keeps on giving way to temper, as I tell her: and I know that from a barber.”
“Tush, you stupid Polly! Does she want to see me?”
“You needn’t suspect that, Miss. But you quiet her best, and I thought I’d come to you. But, gracious!”
Rose pushed past her without vouchsafing any answer to the look in her face, and turned off to Juliana’s chamber, where she was neither welcomed nor repelled. Juliana said she was perfectly well, and that Polly was foolishly officious: whereupon Rose ordered Polly out of the room, and said to Juliana, kindly: “You have not slept, dear, and I have not either. I am so unhappy!”
Whether Rose intended by this communication to make Juliana eagerly attentive, and to distract her from her own affair, cannot be said, but something of the effect was produced.
“You care for him, too,” cried Rose, impetuously. “Tell me, Juley: do you think him capable of any base action? Do you think he would do what any gentleman would be ashamed to own? Tell me.”
Juliana looked at Rose intently, but did not reply.
Rose jumped up from the bed. “You hesitate, Juley? What! Could you think so?”
Young women after one game are shrewd. Juliana may have seen that Rose was not steady on the plank she walked, and required support.
“I don’t know,” she said, turning her cheek to her pillow.
“What an answer!” Rose exclaimed. “Have you no opinion? What did you say yesterday? It’s silent as the grave with me: but if you do care for him, you must think one thing or the other.”
“I suppose not, then—no,” said Juliana.
Repeating the languid words bitterly, Rose continued: “What is it to love without having faith in him you love? You make my mind easier.”
Juliana caught the implied taunt, and said, fretfully: “I’m ill. You’re so passionate. You don’t tell me what it is. How can I answer you?”
“Never mind,” said Rose, moving to the door, wondering why she had spoken at all: but when Juliana sprang forward, and caught her by the dress to stop her, and with a most unwonted outburst of affection, begged of her to tell her all, the wound in Rose’s breast began to bleed, and she was glad to speak.
“Juley, do you—can you believe that he wrote that letter which poor Ferdinand was accused of writing?”
Juliana appeared to muse, and then responded: “Why should he do such a thing?”
“O my goodness, what a girl!” Rose interjected.
“Well, then, to please you, Rose, of course I think he is too honourable.”
“You do think so, Juley? But if he himself confessed it—what then? You would not believe him, would you?”
