“He thought it was you who were going off.”
“I!”
“Yes, yes, he did. I know whose doing that was. Stephen had guessed or found out something, and not having the pluck to stop me himself, and not wanting a general row, he got Harry to suppose it was you who were going off with——”
“But Harry would never have believed that I——”
“Why not?” said Lilian, in a hard tone. “Have you returned his affection for you so very warmly as to make it impossible for him to think that you cared for any one but him? However, it is not for me to reproach you, especially on the score of want of wifely devotion. When he found it was I, Harry tried to drag me away; but I struggled to escape from him, and told him not to interfere with me. He would not let me go, and I told him——You will be shocked, Annie, but I loved the man—I do now—and I was desperate. I asked Harry how he could be sure he was not too late. And he looked me straight in the face very steadily, so that I felt awfully ashamed of myself, and he said, ‘I may not be in time to save your character, but at least I will save your reputation.’ And for a moment I stood quite still, hesitating, while he still held my arm. He had a revolver in his other hand. Before I spoke again, Herbert—Colonel Richardson sprung forward, snatched the revolver from him, and struck him in the face with it, while he tried to pull me away. But Harry never let go, and that decided me. I told Herbert he was a coward to strike a man hardly recovered from illness, and that I would not go with him. Harry, poor fellow, could not have kept me back then; I had to support him; and I led him back here, and we slipped into the house; and he begged me to bring him to your door, and go to my room, and no one should know anything about it, if I would promise never to try to go off again. I didn’t promise—I hadn’t time; but I never will, all the same. And, Annie, he is worth loving. Do try to love him back! Oh, you would if you knew what it is to have a husband who is a monument of all the virtues, but a monument in stone!”
And the wayward woman, who, with all her faults, had generous impulses, laid her beautiful head on the bed and sobbed.
She insisted on sharing Annie’s duties as nurse; and, when Harry, after being long in danger for his life, at last flickered back toward convalescence, the first person he recognized at his bedside was his sister. Her passionate nature, which in many respects resembled his, had been deeply moved by what he had done for her, and still more by the unexpectedly quiet and dignified way in which he had done it. She had had time to see the depth of the social abyss into which her proposed flight would have plunged her. Her long-standing preference for Herbert Richardson she had not subdued—she felt that she could not subdue it; but she had broken off even her correspondence with him at Harry’s request.
Brother and sister drew near to each other, with far deeper mutual affection than they had ever felt before, during Harry’s slow return to health. They felt that they had much in common, both ardent, passionate natures being tied to colder ones, who could not or would not respond to their warmth with the entire abandonment they craved. There the likeness in their positions ended, however, for Lilian had never even tried to sound the depths in the heart of her middle-aged husband, while every look, every touch that Harry bestowed on his wife told wistfully of the longing he had felt to be master of her love as he was already of her duty.
The gentleness and even the tenderness of her care of him now would have satisfied any one less exacting. But fondness had made the young fellow clear-sighted; and he knew, or thought he knew, that her heart could give more than that, if he could only reach it.
Annie herself, who seemed in this matter to have exchanged wits with her husband, growing duller of perception as he grew brighter, fancied that his fondness for his sister had grown stronger than his fondness for her, and, after a moment’s pique, she felt glad of it, as it rendered an avowal she had to make all the easier.