“You must not hope, Lady Eridge. If Lady Sarah were to have the least suspicion that I was to be held up to her as a pattern, my life would at once become unendurable. And I should be sorry to have to go, for Caryl’s sake.”
Lady Eridge leaned back with a sigh.
“I shall persist in hoping,” she said gently. “And in believing that you may be working for good without your own knowledge.”
When Rhoda went away she was oppressed by a new sense of responsibility and uneasiness. New difficulties seemed to be cropping up at every step. The idea of her influencing the wilful, artful wife of Sir Robert was laughable, or would have been so if she had not felt that there was something pitiful in the anxiety of the mother to bring wholesome influences to bear upon her self-willed, extravagant daughter.
Of course Rhoda knew that she could do nothing, unless indeed she could contrive to put in a word of warning to Sir Robert to tighten his hold a little on his erratic wife.
But how was she to dare to intervene?
She was walking more and more slowly, weighed down by her anxieties, when she heard rapid footsteps behind her, and then her name uttered in Jack Rotherfield’s voice:
“Miss Pembury!”
The next moment he had caught her up, and was laughing down merrily into her face. In spite of all that she knew and all that she guessed, Rhoda found it impossible to be as stiff and cold to him as she wished. How could she retain her belief that he was guilty of manslaughter, if not of actual murder, when he could laugh so merrily, and speak so light-heartedly, that she could scarcely believe the man of thirty to be more than a boy still?
“I’ve been tearing after you for three fields and a half, and now I’m completely blown and can only pant!” he cried, with an affectation of laboured breathing which hardly interfered with his volubility. “I’ve been hanging about to escort you back to the Mill-house. I knew you’d take the short cut through the fields, and it’s hardly safe or pleasant for a young lady so late as this.”