Most treacherous even of all that called thee Lord!
—Swinburne.
No one—not even her parents—knew what the proposed journey cost the girl in bitter sense of shame. She had, in order to consent to this pilgrimage of humiliation, to put aside all thoughts of her own feelings in the matter. She as a sentient, thinking, suffering woman must for awhile cease to be; her individuality must sink into nothingness, her pride, alas, must be broken on the wheel of her filial affection, crushed out of all desire for rebellion.
If the dear folk thought that a personal appeal to Lord Stowmaries was a possible loophole out of the present abyss of sorrow and disgrace, then she—Rose Marie—would lend herself to that appeal: and that not as a martyr, a saint going to the rack, but as readily, as cheerfully, as if the meeting with the man who had despised and discarded her, who had sold her to another man, as if seeing him face to face was at least a matter of indifference to her.
Once having made up her mind to the sacrifice, Rose Marie would not allow herself to think of it. She set to her little preparations for the journey with well-feigned eagerness. Even maman was at times deceived, for the child would sing whilst she put a few stitches to the clothes which she was to take away.
Only when she was quite alone, or lying awake in the narrow little bed in the wall, would that sinful and rebellious pride rise up in arms, and Rose Marie would almost have to cling to the woodwork of her bed lest she found herself jumping up and rushing to her parents with a frantic cry of revolt: "I cannot go! I cannot do it!"
One word of protest from her even at this eleventh hour, and the journey would have been abandoned. But she made no protest, and the day for the voyage was fixed.
It was some two or three days before the projected departure that M. Legros, going down at his accustomed hour, to see the last of his 'prentices and cutters ere they left the workshop, found that two strangers were waiting to speak with him.
One of them was not altogether a stranger, for Papa Legros looking—with the keen eyes of a successful business man—on the unkempt and slouchy figure that stood expectantly in the doorway soon made up his mind that he had seen the face before. A second look decided the point, and brought back with a sharp pang the bitter memory of that gay wedding festivity which the advent of this same stranger, then the bearer of a fateful letter, had so rudely interrupted.
Daniel Pye and his companion, a meek-faced young man who looked like a scholar very much out at elbows, were kept humbly standing in the doorway, the while the 'prentices filed out past them, on the close of the working-day. We may assume that these rowdy youngsters did not make the two men's halt there any too pleasant for them. But Pye had learnt patience in the past two months, ever since he had ceased to be the dreaded majordomo in a pretty woman's household. He did not understand the gibes aimed at him by the impertinent crowd, and the pin-pricks, covert pinches and other physical inconveniences to which he was subjected left him passably indifferent.