“Let me go, Mr. Candover, let me go.”
They were within the conservatory doors, which he had contrived to close without releasing her. Still holding her fast, he looked with passionate eyes into her face and whispered:—
“Let you go? Let you go? No, Audrey, no. I’ve loved you, waited for a kind word from you, patiently, humbly. But one can’t be humble and patient for ever. Audrey, you’ve never been loved before, you don’t know what it is to hold a man’s heart in your hand, as you hold mine!”
Audrey listened in dumb terror. Loathing the very touch of this man in his new aspect, panting to get free from him, she yet felt the horrible power he possessed, and dreaded its effect upon her.
Waiting for her opportunity, she suddenly tore herself away, and facing him with fierce eyes, cried:—
“You can speak so to me, you. The friend of my husband, the man who professed so much for my poor Gerard!”
But Mr. Candover had either forgotten his prudence, or felt that he needed it no longer. Coming closer to her, and trying once more to clasp her in his arms, he cried in a tone of the utmost scorn:—
“Gerard! Gerard! Why do you pretend to care about him? Why keep up the farce of believing him to be what you know he is not? Why not snap your fingers at the memory of the wretch, when you know, and I know, and everybody knows, that his punishment was a just one, that he was a forger and a thief!”
CHAPTER IX
If the skies had fallen, poor Audrey could not have been more utterly bewildered, dismayed and shocked than she was by this frank and deliberate statement of Mr. Candover’s that he believed Gerard to be guilty of the crime for which he was suffering.