"Is she not here?" exclaimed Hortensia, in an eager tone, with the blood suddenly rushing up into her cheek, more from surprise and the sudden pressure of many strange considerations in her mind than from any great disappointment or annoyance. "Why did she not come? She must have received my letter?"
"She was too, ill to come," replied Ralph; "but I fear my stay may be inconvenient to you--perhaps not quite right. There can be no harm or danger in my going forward at once on my way."
"Ralph," exclaimed Hortensia, in a somewhat reproachful tone, "you do not think me so weak--so foolish! Surely, if my good name be so frail a thing as not to bear the giving shelter in an hour of danger to the son of my mother's dearest friend, it were little worth the keeping. You stay, Ralph--you stay, if you have any regard for me! No, no, it matters not. I asked my good cousin out of deference to the cold world's opinion. Having done that, I have done enough."
Well may prophets, and, by their tongues, the great Creator of the human heart, declare that it is the most deceitful of all things; for any one who has ever rendered the secrets of the dark, mysterious cavern of his own bosom objective to the analysis of reason, must have recoiled from the scrutiny, deterred by the fearful complications which the eye, at one glance, can perceive. How far--and how far willingly--Lady Danvers was deceiving herself, it is hardly necessary to inquire. It is quite unnecessary, and would be useless, to attempt to trace all the tortuous and darkling passages by which the deception crept along. Certain it is, however, she had persuaded herself that the son of her mother's dearest friend--of her adopted sister--stood toward her almost in the relation of a brother; that she could not do too much for him; that she could do nothing within the bounds of modesty and honor that was not justifiable and justified in the bright, clear, piercing eye of heaven.
Strong in the rectitude and purity of her own purpose, she cared little for the dull, dark, earthy eye of the world. But she little recollected that there is a misty, shadowy land, between the pellucid light above and the coarse darkness below, where the phantoms of associations hover between the two--ever beheld from the one realm, and sometimes too clearly displayed to the other. She did not ask herself--she did not venture to ask herself--what personal feelings, what mortal affections were stealing in and mingling unperceived with the calm, unselfish, soulful memories which had first drawn her thoughts to Ralph Woodhall. She knew not--she would not know--that there was any difference whatsoever in her feelings toward him, as they walked there in her own park side by side, from those with which she had first beheld him at the Duke of Norfolk's house, a stranger in all but memories. She loved to call him to herself--to think of him in her own mind as her brother Ralph. Oh, cunning heart, how skillful art thou even in snatching the artifice of indistinct words to veil thy workings from the deceived eye of thy master. She would not have called him Mr. Woodhall now for the world. It would have broken the spell--destroyed the illusion. He would have been no longer her brother, but her lover--or him whom she loved. The very thought that her heart could have been so far given, as it really was, to one who had never sought or asked it, would have been death to her; for, with all the warm tenderness of her feelings, the deep, strong, enthusiastic tone of her affections, she had every quality of a true woman: that nearest approach to the angel which the latter world has ever seen.
Let the cold argue against such things. Let the worldly. Argue, ye bound up, molded, fettered in the strong conventionalities of a false and factitious state; ye who are tutored from the nursery to the altar, to bend your wills and crush your hearts before the great world's god, Convenience. In that age--base, corrupt, debased as it was--one of the worst that earth has ever seen--in the reaction--in the rebellion of man's heart and soul against the iron tyranny of a cold and false fanaticism, there were glorious instances of pure and true devotion, of strong and deep affection, of passion above license, of morality beyond decorum, which are rarely seen now when the fire of fanaticism is extinguished, and the rigid rules of a cynical religion have been superseded by the gilded but unsubstantial fetters of an eye-serving propriety. Nay, more, the most licentious chronicle of the scandals of that age, the witty scoffer at every virtue, the pleasant companion of every vice, has been the one to record some of the brightest exceptions to the system in which he moved and had his being.
The freedom of the times; the liberty of thought and action in which she had been brought up; the independence of all conventional forms, except those of courtly ceremony, which prevailed during the whole time of her youth; the very dangers, difficulties, intrigues, cabals, slaughter, agitation, and extraordinary circumstances which marked the latter years of Charles the Second, had rendered Hortensia independent, from a very early period, of the world's opinion; and in the case of Ralph Woodhall, she had already paid it more deference than she was ever inclined to pay.
True, had she asked her own heart why she had yielded thus far to a power she contemned and despised, she might have found there was a weakness in her own bosom which counseled caution. But she would ask her own heart nothing, as I have before said. Like an unskillful general, in the certainty of some strong points--honor, uprightness, purity, and truth--she thought her position impregnable, and made no allowance for the easy slope of passion, or the covert ways of love.
Thus onward she walked with Ralph, repelling the very thought of his quitting her house on account of what the world might say with utter scorn. I know not whether the thought ever presented itself to her mind that there was an easy way of silencing the tongue of scandal by uniting their fate forever; I rather think not; but I am quite sure that such a thought never crossed the mind of Ralph. However, if she was satisfied, he had no cause to be otherwise; for he was not such a Quixote in delicacy as to fear that which, with her better knowledge, she did not fear.
He laughed gayly, then--more gayly than he had done for many a day--saying, "Well, dear Lady Danvers, I only sought to show my devotion to your will by my readiness to go, rather than put you in unpleasant circumstances; but, at the same time, I must tell you that no such dangers exist in my case as you have been led to suppose. My poor cousin Henry, by whosesoever hand he fell, owes not his death to me. I would have sacrificed any thing but honor rather than have crossed swords with him. My long absence from the inn, which perhaps you may have heard of, and which might have given time, though barely, for me to return to Norwich, can be every moment accounted for."