She paused, flushing as she felt the significance of her words, and continued: “Yet there is—I cannot tell what. I feel something. It is not reasonable to go upon one’s feelings; but there it is, and so I do not trust him.”
“It is the way he lives, here in these lonely woods—the mystery around him.”
A change passed over her. With the first glow of meeting the object of her visit had receded, though since her last interview with the Seigneur she had not rested a moment, in her anxiety to warn him of his danger. “Oh, no,” she said, lifting her eyes frankly to his: “oh, no, Monsieur! It is not that. There is mystery about you!” She felt her heart beating hard. It almost choked her, but she kept on bravely. “People say strange and bad things about you. No one knows”—she trembled under the painful inquiry of his eyes. Then she gained courage and went on, for she must make it clear she trusted him, that she took him at his word, before she told him of the peril before him—“No one knows where you came from... and it is nobody’s business. Some people do not believe in you. But I believe in you—I should believe in you if every one doubted; for there is no feeling in me that says, ‘He has done some wicked thing that stands-between us.’ It isn’t the same as with Portugais, you see—naturally, it could not be the same.”
She seemed not to realise that she was telling more of her own heart than she had ever told. It was a revelation, having its origin in an honesty which impelled a pure outspokenness to himself. Reserve, of course, there had been elsewhere, for did not she hold a secret with him? Had she not hidden things, equivocated else where? Yet it had been at his wish, to protect the name of a dead man, for the repose of whose soul masses were now said, with expensive candles burning. For this she had no repentance; she was without logic where this man’s good was at stake.
Charley had before him a problem, which he now knew he never could evade in the future. He could solve it by none of the old intellectual means, but by the use of new faculties, slowly emerging from the unexplored fastnesses of his nature.
“Why should you believe in me?” he asked, forcing himself to smile, yet acutely alive to the fact that a crisis was impending. “You, like all down there in Chaudiere, know nothing of my past, are not sure that I haven’t been a hundred times worse than you think poor Jo there. I may have been anything. You may be harbouring a man the law is tracking down.”
In all that befell Rosalie Evanturel thereafter, never could come such another great resolute moment. There was nothing to support her in the crisis but her own faith. It needed high courage to tell this man who had first given her dreams, then imagination, hope, and the beauty of doing for another’s well-being rather than for her own—to tell this man that he was a suspected criminal. Would he hate her? Would his kindness turn to anger? Would he despise her for even having dared to name the suspicion which was bringing hither an austere Abbe and officers of the law?
“We are harbouring a man the law is tracking down,” she said with an infinite appeal in her eyes.
He did not quite understand. He thought that perhaps she meant Jo, and he glanced towards the door; but she kept her eyes on him, and they told him that she meant himself. He chilled, as though ether were being poured through his veins.
Did the world know, then, that Charley Steele was alive? Was the law sending its officers to seize the embezzler, the ruffian who had robbed widow and orphan?