“Yes. Why, what is the matter?”
“Nothing,” said she, in her usual voice, but the color did not come back to her cheeks.
Now, Aubrey knew very well that “nothing” would not affect Miss Langton as that mere mention of a place had done; but he saw, too, that she did not intend to give him a truer answer. It was not difficult to come to the conclusion that there were unpleasant associations connected in her mind with the place to which they were going; and, after long deliberation, he made up his mind definitely that Beckham should be the place where he would at last screw up his courage to the point of asking her to be his wife.
“If she likes me—and I think—I almost think she does”—he reflected that night—“why, my proposal will be the very best thing to drive any unhappy recollections of the place out of her head. If she won’t have me—well, there is a river at Beckham!”
With which dark suggestion Aubrey blew out his candle and went to sleep.
CHAPTER XIV.
Annie felt half inclined at first to request the manager, on the plea of illness, to let his niece, who was her “understudy,” play her parts for the week the company were to spend at Beckham, and take her chance of his allowing her to rejoin them at the next town they visited. The incompetent little niece was eager, as Annie knew, for such a chance, and there would probably be little difficulty as far as that part of the matter was concerned.
But, besides the fact that she could ill afford to lose even one week’s salary and risk the canceling of the rest of her engagement, she felt sure that there was one person whom the plea of illness would in no way deceive. Aubrey Cooke’s attention had already been awakened to her reluctance to visit Beckham, and he was far too sharp a young man not to be dangerous if she were to give him involuntarily a clew to a secret she did not want to trust him with.
And the secret of her marriage she wished to keep from all her present associates. The miserable tie seemed to be less binding when all around her were ignorant of it. For a long time she had almost forgotten it in the unfettered life she had led since she left Garstone; but the remembrance of it had begun lately to irritate her strangely. There was now nothing on earth she dreaded so much as the possibility of her husband’s finding her out, and in a fit of capricious obstinacy or tyranny insisting on her return to him. The thought of being again at the mercy of that ignorant, drunken boy filled her with a disgust which was now not even mingled with pity. And she was to be brought against her will to the very town which he and his brothers visited almost daily.
But, after long reflection, she decided that the risk of her being recognized in Beckham was not so great as she had pictured it to be in her first terror at the thought of going thither. The families living round about Beckham, as is usually the case with country towns, very seldom visited the theater—the Braithwaites never. Upon William’s authority, she was so much altered that, with the help of a veil and other such simple disguises, she might pass unrecognized even by people among whom she had lived. When the young men from the Grange came into Beckham, they were almost always on horseback or driving, so that it would be easy for any one on foot to avoid them; and, above all, she was on the alert to escape them, while they had not the least suspicion of her coming. In the town itself there was very little fear of her being recognized by the inhabitants. She had not been in it much at any time, and was very little known there. The mere change of name would be enough to prevent their identification of “Miss Lane” or “Mrs. Harold Braithwaite” with “Miss Langton.”