"I say! Mind whom you trust in this house. There's no harm in Mrs. Redmain; she only grows stupid directly she don't like a thing. But that Miss Yolland!—that woman's the devil. I know more about her than you or any one else. I can't bear her to be about Hesper; but, if I told her the half I know, she would not believe the half of that. I shall find a way, though. But I am forgetting! you know her as well as I do—that is, you would, if you were wicked enough to understand. I will tell you one of these days what, I am going to do. There! don't say a word. I want no advice on such things. Go along, and send Mewks."
With all his suspicion of the man, Mr. Redmain did not suspect how false Mewks was: he did not know that Miss Yolland had bewitched him for the sake of having an ally in the enemy's camp. All he could hear—and the dressing-room door was handy—the fellow duly reported to her. Already, instructed by her fears, she had almost divined what Mr. Redmain meant to do.
Mary went and sat on the lowest step of the stair just outside the room.
"What are you doing there?" said Lady Margaret, coming from the corridor.
"Mr. Redmain will not have me go yet, my lady," answered Mary, rising. "I must wait first till he sends for me."
Lady Margaret swept past her, murmuring, "Most peculiar!" Mary sat down again.
In about an hour, Mewks came and said his master wanted her.
He was very ill, and could not talk, but he would not let her go. He made her sit where he could see her, and now and then stretched out his hand to her. Even in his pain he showed a quieter spirit. "Something may be working—who can tell!" thought Mary.
It was late in the afternoon when at length he sought further conversation.
"I have been thinking, Mary," he said, "that if I do wake up in hell when I die, no matter how much I deserve it, nobody will be the better for it, and I shall be all the worse."