Matilda was the kind of woman whom we all adore as represented in the characters of Fielding’s Amelia and Sophia. Such she was, so gracious and yielding, in her overt demeanour, but, alas, poor Matilda’s pillow was often wet with her tears. She was loyal; she would not believe evil: she crushed her natural jealousy ‘as a vice of blood, upon the threshold of the mind.’
Mrs. Brown-Smith was nearly as unhappy as the girl. The more she hated the Vidame—and she detested him more deeply every day—the more her heart bled for Matilda. Mrs. Brown-Smith also had her secret conferences with Mrs. Malory.
‘Nothing will shake her belief in that man,’ said Mrs. Malory.
‘Your daughter is the best girl I ever met,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘The best tempered, the least suspicious, the most loyal. And I am doing my worst to make her hate me. Oh, I can’t go on!’ Here Mrs. Brown-Smith very greatly surprised her hostess by bursting into tears.
‘You must not desert us now,’ said the elder lady. ‘The better you think of poor Matilda—and she is a good girl—the more you ought to help her.’
It was the 8th of August, no other visitors were at the house, a shooting party was expected to arrive on the 11th. Mrs. Brown-Smith dried her tears. ‘It must be done,’ she said, ‘though it makes me sick to think of it.’
Next day she met the Vidame in the park, and afterwards held a long conversation with Mrs. Malory.
As for the Vidame, he was in feverish high spirits, he devoted himself to Matilda, in fact Mrs. Brown-Smith had insisted on such dissimulation, as absolutely necessary at this juncture of affairs. So Matilda bloomed again, like a rose that had been ‘washed, just washed, in a shower.’ The Vidame went about humming the airs of the country which he had honoured by adopting it as the cradle of his ancestry.
On the morning of the following day, while the Vidame strayed with Matilda in the park, Mrs. Brown-Smith was closeted with Mrs. Malory in her boudoir.
‘Everything is arranged,’ said Mrs. Brown-Smith. ‘I, guilty and reckless that I am, have only to sacrifice my character, and all my things. But I am to retain Methven, my maid. That concession I have won from his chivalry.’