“And so, having cut the ground from under me, he stepped back, and instigated madam to her little coup de theâtre, I suppose, and helped her to push me over the precipice. And you—you sympathised with and abetted him?”
“Ay,” he said sorrowfully: “witness my long exile here, gnawing my fingers in the hungry moonlight.”
I sank upon the ground in a passion of tears, and he mingled his grief with mine.
“Child, I had loved him; and I had but to learn how he had abandoned you, to leave him. I cursed him—cursed de Crespigny. Will Jove forgive me? What matter, if I have saved you?”
I lifted my drowned eyes and agonised arms.
“Take me to Patty,” I cried, “and let me weep my soul out on her kind little heart.”
He shook his head.
“What!” I said; “you will not?”
“She must not even know,” he said. “I could not trust her anxious love. She must rest as she is, aware of my endless scheming, but not of its fruits. Some day, perhaps. And in the meanwhile my lady is gone honeymooning; there is no hope of appeal to her. A breath would redeliver you to your fate, and perhaps a worse. Come, and tell me all you have suffered, poor mistress.”
I crept to his feet, and in broken tones gave him the history of my misery, to the day, to the hour when he had appeared before me.