"Well, we'll see Mina and hear if she's got anything to say. Fancy that little monkey being drawn into a thing like this! Meanwhile we'll say nothing. I don't believe it, and I shall want a lot of convincing. Until I am convinced everything stands as it did. I rely on you for that, Neeld—and I rely on you to come to Merrion to-morrow. Not a word to my wife—above all not a word to Janie!" He got up, took possession of Neeld's review, and walked off into the house with his business-like quick stride.
Neeld sat there, slowly rubbing his hands against one another between his knees. He was realizing what he had done, or rather what had happened to him. When his life, his years, and what he conceived to be his character were considered, it was a
very surprising thing, this silence of his—the conspiracy he had entered into with Mina Zabriska, the view of duty which the Imp, or Harry, or the thought of beautiful Addie Tristram, or all of them together, had made him take. So strange a view for him! To run counter to law, to outrage good sense, to slight the claims of friendship, to suppress the truth, to aid what Iver so relentlessly called a fraud—all these were strange doings for him to be engaged in. And why had he done it? The explanation was as strange as the things that he invoked it to explain. Still rubbing his hands, palm against palm, to and fro, he said very slowly, with wonder and reluctance:
"I was carried away. I was carried away by—by romance."
The word made him feel a fool. Yet what other word was there for the overwhelming unreasoning feeling that at the cost of everything the Tristrams, mother and son, must keep Blent, the son living and the mother dead, that the son must dwell there and the spirit of the mother be about him she loved in the spot that she had graced? It was very rank romance indeed—no other word for it! And—wildest paradox—it all came out of editing Josiah Cholderton's Journal.
Before he had made any progress in unravelling his skein of perplexities he saw Janie coming across the lawn. She took the chair her father had left and seemed to take her father's mood with it; the same oppressive silence settled on her. Neeld broke it this time.
"You don't look very merry, Miss Janie," he said, smiling at her and achieving a plausible jocularity.
"Why should I, Mr Neeld?" She glanced at him. "Oh, has father told you anything?"
"Yes, that you're engaged. You know how truly I desire your happiness, my dear." With a pretty
courtesy the old man took her hand and kissed it, baring his gray hair the while.