‘You will watch over her, Dartrey? She stays-her father wishes—up to—ah! We can hardly be in such extreme peril. He has her doctor, her lawyer, and her butler—a favourite servant—to check, and influence, her: She—you know who it is!—does not, I am now convinced, mean persecution. She was never a mean-minded woman. Oh! I could wish she were. They say she is going. Then I am to be made an “honest woman of.” Victor wants Nesta, now that she is away, to stay until... You understand. He feels she is safe from any possible kind of harm with those good ladies. And I feel she is the safer for having you near. Otherwise, how I should pray to have you with us! Daily I have to pass through, well, something like the ordeal of the red-hot ploughshares—and without the innocence, dear friend! But it’s best that my girl should not have to be doing the same; though she would have the innocence. But she writhes under any shadow of a blot. And for her to learn the things that are in the world, through her mother’s history!—and led to know it by the falling away of friends, or say, acquaintances! However ignorant at present, she learns from a mere nothing. I dread!.... In a moment, she is a blaze of light. There have been occurrences. Only Victor could have overcome them! I had to think it better for my girl, that she was absent. We are in such a whirl up there! So I work round again to “how long?” and the picture of myself counting the breaths of a dying woman. The other day I was told I was envied!’
‘Battle, battle, battle; for all of us, in every position!’ said Dartrey sharply, to clip a softness: ‘except when one’s attending on an invalid uncle. Then it’s peace; rather like extinction. And I can’t be crying for the end either. I bite my moustache and tap foot on the floor, out of his hearing; make believe I’m patient. Now I ‘ll fetch Nesta.’
Mrs. Blathenoy came down with an arm on Nesta’s shoulder. She held a telegram, and said to Nataly—
‘What can this mean? It’s from my husband; he puts “Jacob”: my husband’s Christian name:—so like my husband, where there’s no concealment! There—he says:
“Down to-night else pack ready start to-morrow.” Can it signify, affairs are bad with my husband in the city?’
It had that signification to Nataly’s understanding. At the same time, the pretty little woman’s absurd lisping repetition of ‘my husband’ did not seem without design to inflict the wound it caused.
In reality, it was not malicious; it came of the bewitchment of a silly tongue by her knowledge of the secret to be controlled: and after contrasting her fortunes with Nataly’s, on her way downstairs, she had comforted herself by saying, that at least she had a husband. She was not aware that she dealt a hurt until she had found a small consolation in the indulgence: for Captain Dartrey Fenellan admired this commanding figure of a woman, who could not legally say that which the woman he admired less, if at all, legally could say.
‘I must leave you to interpret,’ Nataly remarked.
Mrs. Blathenoy resented her unbefitting queenly style. For this reason, she abstained from an intended leading up to mention of the ‘singular-looking lady’ seen riding with Miss Radnor more than once; and as to whom, Miss Radnor (for one gives her the name) had not just now, when questioned, spoken very clearly. So the mother’s alarms were not raised.
And really it was a pity, Mrs. Blathenoy said to Dartrey subsequently; finding him colder than before Mrs. Radnor’s visit; it was a pity, because a young woman in Miss Radnor’s position should not by any possibility be seen in association with a person of commonly doubtful appearance.