“No, sir; I won’t be silent!”
“But, good God, my dear, need you drag this stranger into our intimate concerns?”
“He’s no stranger to me, Mr. Bellairs. We travelled down in the coach together, and he couldn’t have been more civil to me if I’d been a lady born; no, nor kinder if he’d been my father. Oh, sir, I don’t know your name, but I know by the pitying way you looked at me that you understood what dreadful danger I was in and how—” again she sobbed—“how ready I was to yield to it! He wanted me to go to Paris with him. He did, indeed! He wanted his love to be my all-in-all, and nothing else was to matter. I’ve been a wicked girl! I listened to him. I never would listen to him before—not when he spoke like that—but to-night I did. Heaven forgive me! What took me?”
“Confound!” said Mr. Bellairs.
He wheeled away from the sight of her weeping, clutched the mantelpiece with both hands, and dropped his head on them.
“Well, ’tis all over now.”
Sir Everard spoke uneasily. This openness upon a subject so delicate was painful to him, but Pamela had the yearning to relieve herself by confession.
“Oh, sir, how could I do it? I don’t know myself. I swear when I look back ’tis as if I had not been myself at all. Something came into me—so rash, so desperate! ’Twas as if nothing mattered but just his love, our love. And then—then—when those two came in I saw our sin as it was. Oh, heavens! Oh, Heaven forgive me! Murder and every evil was there. Would I not have been just as cruel, done just as horrid murder? When the truth came out, would my father and mother and my own dear loves at home, waiting for me so fond and so trusting, and so proud of their poor, silly Pam, ever have held up their heads again? Oh, base, base! I would have murdered them for my pleasure. And that love, what was it? The thing that those two looked at each other, something vile, something that brought contamination even just to see go between them. Did he and I look at each other like that? It turned me sick even to think on, even before—before that poor, poor man came in! Heaven forgive me! Heaven strike those two in their bad hearts! Oh, sir, did you look at her when she stared back upon us, that woman? I suppose there was beauty in her face; I suppose he who went with her thought her handsome airs worth the cruelty and the blood and the crime on his soul. But to me she was ugly, all ugly, with the ugliness of her sin——”
She broke off, bit her quivering lip, and stared fixedly before her; an expression of horror on her countenance as if she still beheld the ugliness of which she spoke.
Mr. Bellairs straightened himself and snapped his fingers again.