Eleanor,” he murmured in a low voice; “can you forgive me?”
His wife lifted her eyes to his face. Those luminous grey eyes had a look of mournful sweetness in them.
“Forgive you!” exclaimed Eleanor, “it is you who have so much to forgive. But I will atone—I will atone—after to-night.”
She said these last words almost in a whisper, rather as if she had been speaking to herself than to her husband; but Gilbert Monckton heard those whispered syllables, and drew his own conclusions from them. Unhappily every word that Mrs. Monckton uttered tended to confirm her husband’s doubts and to increase his wretchedness.
He seated himself in a reading-chair upon the opposite side of the hearth, and, drawing a lamp close to his elbow, buried himself, or appeared to bury himself, in his newspapers.
But every now and then the upper margin of the “Times,” or the “Post,” or the “Athenæum,” or the “Saturday,” or whatever journal the lawyer happened to be perusing—and he took up one after the other with a fretful restlessness that betokened a mind ill at ease—dropped a little lower than the level of the reader’s eyes, and Mr. Monckton looked across the edge of the paper at his wife.
Almost every time he did so he found that Eleanor’s eyes were fixed upon the clock.
The discovery of this fact speedily became a torture to him. He followed his wife’s eyes to the slowly moving hands upon the enameled dial. He watched the minute-hand as it glided from one figure to another, marking intervals of five minutes that seemed like five hours. Even when he tried to read, the loud ticking of the wretched time-piece came between him and the sense of the page upon which his eyes were fixed, and the monotonous sound seemed to deafen and bewilder him.
Eleanor sat quite still in her low easy-chair. Scraps of fancy-work and open books lay upon the table beside her, but she made no effort to beguile the evening by any feminine occupation. Laura Mason, restless for want of employment and companionship, fluttered about the room like some discontented butterfly, stopping every now and then before a looking-glass, to contemplate some newly discovered effect in the elegant costume which she called her “pink;” but Eleanor took no notice whatever of her murmured exclamations and appeals for sympathy.
“I don’t know what’s come to you, Nelly, since your marriage,” the young lady cried at last; after vainly trying to draw Mrs. Monckton’s attention to the manifold beauties of gauze puffings and floating streamers of ribbon; “you don’t seem to take any interest in life. You’re quite a different girl to what you were at Hazlewood—before Launcelot came home.”
Mr. Monckton threw down the “Athenæum,” and took up “Punch,” at this juncture. He stared with a stony face at one of Mr. Leech’s most genial cartoons, and glanced almost vengefully at the familiar double columns of jokes. Eleanor looked away from the clock to answer her companion’s peevish compliment.
“I am thinking of Mr. de Crespigny,” she said; “he may be dying while we are sitting here.”
Mr. Monckton dropped “Punch,” and looked, openly this time, at his wife’s face.
Could it be, after all, that her abstraction of manner really arose from no deeper cause than her regret for the loss of this old man, who was her dead father’s friend, and who had displayed an especial affection for her?
Could it be so? No! Her words that night had revealed more than a common sorrow such as this. They had betrayed the secret of a hidden struggle—a woman’s grief—not easily to be repressed or overcome. There is no knowing how long the lawyer might have sat brooding over his troubles under cover of the newspapers, but presently he remembered some papers which he had brought from London that afternoon, and which it was his imperative duty—in the interests of a very important client—to read that night.
He pushed away the lamp, rose from his low chair, and went to the door of the drawing-room.
“I am going to my study, Eleanor,” he said; “I shall most likely spend the rest of the evening there, and I may be obliged to be very late. You won’t sit up for me?”
“Oh, no; not unless you wish it.”
“On no account. Good-night. Good-night, Laura.”
Even while his wife wished him good-night, her eyes wandered uneasily back to the clock. A quarter to ten.
“And he hasn’t once looked at my pink!” murmured Miss Mason, as her guardian left the drawing-room.
Scarcely had the door closed when Eleanor Monckton rose from her chair.
Her flushed cheeks flamed with crimson brightness; her eyes were lighted up as if a fire had burned in their dilated pupils.
“I am going to bed, Laura,” she said abruptly; “I am very tired. Good night!”
She took a candle from a table near the door, lit it, and hurried from the room before Laura could question her or remonstrate with her.
“She doesn’t look tired,” thought Miss Mason; “she looks as if she were going to a ball; or going to have the scarlatina. I think I looked like that when I was going to have the scarlatina; and when Launcelot proposed to me.”
Five minutes after the stable-clock struck ten, the great door of Tolldale Priory was opened by a cautious hand, and Mrs. Monckton stole out of her house with a woollen cloak wrapped about her, and her head almost buried in the hood belonging to the thick winter garment. She closed the door softly, and then, without stopping to look behind her, hurried down the broad stone steps, across the courtyard, along the gravelled garden pathway, out at the narrow wooden door in the wall, and away into the dreary darkness of the wood that lay between the Priory grounds and the dwelling-place of Maurice de Crespigny.
