“I mean to. I always try to profit by my superiors. She has courage: I have none. I beat about the bush, and talk skim-milk; she uses the very word. She said we have been the dupe and the tool of a little scheming rascal, an anonymous coward, with motives as base as his heart is black—oh! oh! Ay, that is the way to speak of such a man; I can't do it myself, but I reverence the brave lady who can. And she wasn't afraid even of you, dear papa. 'Come, old gentleman'—ha! ha! ha!—'take the world as it is; Belgravian mothers would not break both their hearts for what is past and gone.' What hard good sense! a thing I always did admire: because I've got none. But her heart is not hard; after all her words of fire, that went so straight instead of beating the bush, she ended by crying for me. Oh! oh! oh! Bless her! Bless her! If ever there was a good woman in the world, that is one. She was not born a lady, I am afraid; but that is nothing: she was born a woman, and I mean to make her acquaintance, and take her for my example in all things. No, dear papa, women are not so pitiful to women without cause. She is almost a stranger, yet she cried for me. Can you be harder to me than she is? No; pity your poor girl, who will lose her health, and perhaps her life. Pity poor Charles, stung by an anonymous viper, and laid on a bed of sickness for me. Oh! oh! oh!”
“I do pity you, Bella. When you cry like this, my heart bleeds.”
“I'll try not to cry, papa. Oh! oh!”
“But most of all, I pity your infatuation, your blindness. Poor, innocent dove, that looks at others by the light of her own goodness, and so sees all manner of virtues in a brazen hussy. Now answer me one plain question. You called her 'the Sister!' Is she not the same woman that played the Sister of Charity?”
Bella blushed to the temples, and said, hesitatingly, she was not quite sure.
“Come, Bella. I thought you were going to imitate the jade, and not beat about the bush. Yes or no?”
“The features are very like.”
“Bella, you know it is the same woman. You recognized her in a moment. That speaks volumes. But she shall find I am not to be made 'a dupe and a tool of' quite so easily as she thinks. I'll tell you what—this is some professional actress Sir Charles has hired to waylay you. Little simpleton!”
He said no more at that time; but after dinner he ruminated, and took a very serious, indeed almost a maritime, view of the crisis. “I'm overmatched now,” thought he. “They will cut my sloop out under the very guns of the flagship if we stay much longer in this port—a lawyer against me, and a woman too; there's nothing to be done but heave anchor, hoist sail, and run for it.”
He sent off a foreign telegram, and then went upstairs. “Bella, my dear,” said he, “pack up your clothes for a journey. We start to-morrow.”