“I can ensure you, Father,” pursued the traitress, with an assumption of the utmost meekness, “it hath cost me much sorrow ere I set me to speak unto you.”
“Hast spoken to Blanche aforetime?”
“Not much, Father,” replied Lucrece, in a voice of apparent trouble. “I counted it fitter to refer the same unto your better wisdom; nor, I think, was she like to list me.”
“God have mercy!” moaned the distressed father, thoroughly awake now to the gravity of the case.
“Maybe, Father, you shall think I have left it pass too far,” pursued Lucrece, with well-simulated grief: “yet can you guess that I would not by my goodwill seem to carry complaint of Blanche.”
“Thou hast well done, dear heart, and I thank thee,” answered her deceived father. “But leave me now, my lass; I must think all this gear over. My poor darling!”
Lucrece glided away as softly as the serpent which she resembled in her heart.
In half-an-hour Sir Thomas came back into the house, and sent Jennet to tell his sister that he wished to speak with her in the library. It was characteristic, not of himself, but of his wife, that in his sorrows and perplexities he turned instinctively to Rachel, not to her. When Lucrece’s intelligence was laid before Rachel, though perhaps she grieved less, she was even more shocked than her brother. That Blanche should think of quitting the happy and honourable estate of maidenhood, for the slavery of marriage, was in itself a misdemeanour of the first magnitude: but that she should have made her own choice, have received secret gifts, and held clandestine interviews—this was an awful instance of what human depravity could reach.
“Now, what is to be done?” asked Sir Thomas wearily. “First with Don John, and next with Blanche.”
“Him?—the viper! Pack him out of the house, bag and baggage!” cried the wrathful spinster. “The crocodile, to conspire against the peace of the house which hath received him in his need! Yet what better might you look for in a man and a Papist?”