"My dear fellow it is impossible to say how long she may last; but--though I suppose that's out of the question now, eh?--people will talk, you know, and Ive heard rumours;--but if her husband wished to see her, I should say fetch him at once."
"If her husband wished to see her!" said old Bowker to himself, as he walked away towards his lodgings,--"if her husband wished to see her! He don't--at least the real one don't, I imagine; and Geoff mustn't; though, if he knew it, nothing would keep him away. But that other--Captain Brakespere--he ought to know the danger she's in; he ought to have the chance of saying a kind word to her before--He must be a damned villain!" said old William, stopping for an instant, and pondering over the heads of the story; "but he deserves that chance, and he shall have it."
Pursuant to his determination, Mr. Bowker presented himself the next day at Long's Hotel, where he recollected Mr. Blackett had informed him that Captain Brakespere was stopping. The porter, immediately divining from Mr. Bowker's outward appearance that he meditated a raid upon coats, hats, or any thing that might be lying about the coffee-room, barricaded the entrance with his waistcoat, and parleyed with the visitor in the hall. Inquiring for Captain Brakespere, Mr. Bowker was corrected by the porter, who opined "he meant Lord Catrum." The correction allowed and the inquiry repeated, the porter replied that his "lordship had leff," and referred the inquirer to St. Barnabas Square.
To St. Barnabas Square Mr. Bowker adjourned, but there learned that Lord Caterham had left town with Mr. Barford, and would not be back for some days.
And meanwhile the time was wearing by, and Margaret's hold on life was loosening day by day. Would it fail altogether before she saw the man who had deceived her so cruelly? would it fail altogether before she saw the man whom she had so cruelly deceived?
[CHAPTER VIII.]
IN THE DEEP SHADOW.
In the presence of the double sorrow which had fallen upon her, Annie Maurice's girlhood died out. Arthur was gone, and Geoffrey in so suffering a condition of body and mind that it would have been easier to the tender-hearted girl to know that he was at rest, even though she had to face all the loneliness which would then have been her lot. Her position was very trying in all its aspects at this time; for there was little sympathy with her new sorrow at the great house which she still called home, and where she was regarded as decidedly "odd." Lady Beauport considered that Caterham had infected her with some of his strange notions, and that her fancy for associating with "queer" people, removed from her own sphere not more by her heiress-ship than by her residence in an earl's house and her recognition as a member of a noble family, was chargeable to the eccentric notions of her son. Annie came and went as she pleased, free from comment, though not from observation; but she was of a sensitive nature; she could not assert herself; and she suffered from the consciousness that her grief, her anxiety, and her constant visits to Lowbar were regarded with mingled censure and contempt. Her pre-occupation of mind prevented her noticing many things which otherwise could not have escaped her attention; but when Geoffrey's illness ceased to be actively dangerous, and the bulletin brought her each morning from Til by the hands of the faithful Charley contained more tranquillising but still sad accounts of the patient, she began to observe an air of mystery and preparation in the household. The few hours which she forced herself to pass daily in the society of Lady Beauport had been very irksome to her since Arthur died, and she had been glad when they were curtailed by Lady Beauport's frequent plea of "business" in the evenings, and her leaving the drawing-room for her own apartments. Every afternoon she went to Elm Lodge, and her presence was eagerly hailed by Mrs. Ludlow and Til. She had seen Geoffrey frequently during the height of the fever; but since the letter she had kept in such faithful custody had reached his hands she had not seen him. Though far from even the vaguest conjecture of the nature of its contents, she had dreaded the effect of receiving a communication from his dead friend on Geoffrey Ludlow, and had been much relieved when his mother told her, on the following day, that he was very calm and quiet, but did not wish to see any one for a few days. Bowker and he had fully felt the embarrassment of the position in which Lord Caterham's revelation had placed Geoffrey with regard to Annie Maurice, and the difficulties which the complications produced by Margaret's identity with Lionel Brakespere's wife added to Ludlow's fulfilment of Caterham's trust. They had agreed--or rather Bowker had suggested, and Geoffrey had acquiesced, with the languid assent of a mind too much enfeebled by illness and sorrow to be capable of facing any difficulty but the inevitable, immediate, and pressing--that Annie need know nothing for the present.
"She could hardly come here from the Beauports, Geoff," Bowker had said; "it's all nonsense, of course, to men like you and me, who look at the real, and know how its bitterness takes all the meaning out of the rubbish they call rules of society; but the strongest woman is no freer than Gulliver in his fetters of packthread, in the conventional world she lives in. We need not fret her sooner than it must be done, and you had better not see her for the present."
So Annie came and went for two or three days and did not see Geoffrey. Mrs. Ludlow, having recovered from the sudden shock of her son's illness and the protracted terror of his danger, had leisure to feel a little affronted at his desire for seclusion, and to wonder audibly why she should be supposed to do him more harm than Mr. Bowker.