“What a tragic groan! This morning you were in despair because Miss Wynde rejected you. To-night you are mourning after your corn-chandler’s daughter. I’d like to understand you—I would indeed. Which are you wailing after, Miss Wynde or Lalla Rookh?”
“Which?” cried Rufus, with wild eyes. “For the girl you and I murdered! It is she whom I mourn! I think of her stark form and open eyes and dead bruised face, as she must have looked when they brought her up out of the river, and my heart is like to break within me. She haunts me day and night. In my bed I waken from my dreams to clasp her closer to me, but my arms close on the empty air. I seem to feel the touch of her hands on my face—oh, Heaven! I shall never feel them there again! I was a poor pitiful coward. Yet what could I do? And yet you and I are Lally’s murderers!”
Craven Black shivered involuntarily.
“You act as if you had a touch of the D. T.” he said. “Have you been spending the day in a Canterbury pot-house?”
“No; I have been wandering in the park, trying to forget. You need not fear that I shall get drunk again.”
“Your reflections were rather singular for a rejected lover of Miss Wynde,” sneered Craven Black. “I thought you loved the heiress?”
“So I do, but not as I loved Lally. If Miss Wynde does not take pity on me, I am lost. The love of a good woman would save me from madness and utter despair. In time I might grow to love her as I loved Lally, and in any case I would worship her from very gratitude.”
“I am blessed if I can understand you,” said Craven Black, his lips curling. “You love a dead woman and a living woman, and mourn one while you want to marry the other. It is very curious. It’s a pity you are not a Mahommedan, so that you could have had both.”
“Stop!” cried Rufus, in a tone of command. “Don’t speak such words in connection with the names of Lally and Miss Wynde. I want to marry Neva to save myself from going mad—”
“After another woman? Exactly. No wonder Miss Wynde declined the honor, with thanks.”