“Well, you seem to have behaved like one, at all events,” returned Frere; “unless, indeed,” he continued, as a new light suddenly broke in upon him—“unless, indeed, you really do by any chance care about Lewis as much as he cares about you—of course in that event you would be more to be pitied than blamed.” He paused, then after a moment’s reflection, continued, “But no, that cannot be either; if you had really loved Lewis, you would scarcely have engaged yourself to another man before he had been out of the house four-and-twenty hours. What do you say to that? eh, young lady!”
Poor Annie! heavily indeed did her fault press upon her; most bitterly did she repent the weakness of character which had prevented her from refusing to engage her hand when her heart went not with it. What could she say? Why, she could only sob like an unhappy child, and whisper in a broken voice—
“I will send Laura to you—ask her, she knows all—she can tell you.”
And so running out of the room, she threw herself upon her friend’s neck, and begged her, incoherently and vaguely, to “go immediately to him and explain everything;” with which request Laura, when she had provided the solitary pronoun with a chaperon in the shape of a concordant noun, and restricted the transcendental “everything” to mean the one thing needful in that particular case, hastened to comply.
The commission was rather a delicate one, and the excellent Bear did not render the execution thereof the less difficult by choosing to take a hard-headed, moral, and common-sense view of Annie’s conduct, which confused Laura to such a degree, that in her desire to be particularly lucid, she contrived to entangle the matter so thoroughly that a person with greater tact and more delicate perceptions than the rough and straightforward Frere might have found the affair puzzling.
“Well, I tell you what it is, Mrs. Leicester,” he at last exclaimed abruptly, “if you were to talk to me till midnight, which, seeing you’ve a long journey before you to-morrow, would be equally fatiguing and injudicious, you would never be able to convince me that your young friend acted wisely. The idea of accepting that unhappy man (whose death, between ourselves, was a gain to everybody but himself, though, of course, I shall not say so to poor Charles, who in his amiability contrived to keep up a sort of affection for his brother); but the notion of accepting him to prevent anybody guessing she was in love with Lewis seems to me about the most feeble-minded expedient that ever occurred to the imagination, even of a woman; it’s like cutting one’s throat to cure a sore finger. I don’t admire the principle of judging actions by their results, or I should say the result of this has been just what I should have expected—viz., to make everybody miserable. However, though she has done a foolish thing, that is very different from doing a deliberately wicked one. Well, I suppose we must not be too hard upon her, poor little thing; I dare say Lewis, at all events, will be magnanimous enough to overlook it, in consideration of her correct taste in properly appreciating his good qualities; however, I’ll do my best to explain the matter to him, and put it in as favourable a light as my conscience will allow me. And so wishing you a good journey, I’ll be off. I have a notion it won’t be very long before Lewis and I shall follow you; we shall not be many hours in England before we beat up your quarters, depend upon it. Lewis will have some strange revelations to make to Governor Grant that will cause his venerable locks to stand on end in amazement. Ah! it’s a queer world. Well, good-bye, Mrs. Leicester: I expect you and I should become good friends in time, though you’re quite mistaken if you fancy that young woman acted sensibly in accepting her scampish cousin, when all the time she was in love with another man.”
And thus Richard Frere fairly talked himself out of the house, leaving Laura especially astonished at his brusquerie, and decidedly of opinion that she had mismanaged the affair and done her friend’s cause irreparable injury.