Oh! what a tangled web we weave,
When once we practise to deceive!
Norah found herself now in a position of greater temptation than ever. Milly was in such a state of misery and excitement that Norah dreaded that any opposition might throw her into a nervous fever. The poor, anxious wife would listen to no objection, had patience for no scruple, and was almost wild when Norah showed hesitation about doing her bidding. Miserable, and hating herself for the deceit into which she was drawn, Norah went to her mistress and told the falsehood put into her mouth by Milly.
Mrs. Lowndes was all kindness. Day after day the housemaid was permitted to go and see her sick mother, carrying sometimes little delicacies sent from her mistress's table. When Milly, from the effect of distress and excitement, herself fell ill, Mrs. Lowndes sent Norah instead of her to the hospital two or three times to see "the poor old lady," and questioned her on her return as to the sufferer's state. Thus Norah was led deeper and deeper into deceit. She had to speak of her illness, her danger, her thanks, when coming from the death-bed of a young man, and she felt that her whole character was becoming gradually lowered and degraded. Never since she had first sought the Lord had Norah been in so low a spiritual state; even to speak of religion to little Selina appeared to her to be an act of hypocrisy now. Norah had sometimes a terrible doubt as to whether she had ever been a Christian at all!
Happily for Norah she was suddenly to be stopped in this downward path. It was a mercy to be arrested even by a blow.
One afternoon in April the bell summoned Norah to the presence of her mistress. She went down the stairs with a sinking at the heart, a feeling of misgiving from which she now very frequently suffered. What was her alarm, on opening the drawing-room door, to see, seated near her mistress, the chaplain of the hospital, whom she had met before on one of her visits to Doyle! Norah dared not even glance at her lady, but the sound of that terrible, deep-toned voice, so expressive of subdued indignation, made the wretched Norah guess but too well what was coming.
"Mr. Chancie has called to ask me to break to my housemaid the news of the death of her husband." There was a marked emphasis on the last word. "Am I to understand that this is the person whom she, and whom you have visited again and again, and spoken of repeatedly to me under the name of her mother?"
Norah pressed the nails of her right hand so tightly into the flesh of the left that traces were left for days!
"Am I to understand," continued the lady, speaking in the same low, terrible tone, "that you and Milly have deliberately conspired together for months to deceive the mistress who trusted you?"
Norah wished that she could sink down anywhere out of sight, into the cellar, or into the grave.
"You leave this house to-morrow," said the lady, who could not but read confession in the silence of her maid, and her aspect of misery and shame. "If your family were in London, you should not stay here for another hour. To think that I should have entrusted my child to the care of such a"—Norah could not catch the concluding word, perhaps none was uttered, but her own conscience supplied the blank with "viper." "Of course you can expect no character from me; your vile deceit has done much to shake my faith in all my kind; I shall never trust a servant again as you were trusted by me. I could no more answer for your honesty now, wretched girl, than I could for your truth. She who could deliberately carry on such a course of deceit would be capable of taking my money."