And now when passing through a long and lonely wainscotted corridor, the windows of which on one side overlooked the haugh beneath the house, and which led to the great staircase, she came suddenly upon the very object of her dread, Mr. Sharpe, and hastily thrust her letter into the bosom of her dress.
Though her own mistress, with her engagement to Captain Elliot acknowledged and accepted by her brother, Maude, from the influence of circumstances, was—as stated—actually afraid lest this daring admirer should discover that she was writing to Elliot, so much did she dread the power of Sharpe and his sister, and their capacity for working mischief.
Some vague sense, or doubt, of his security in the future, and of his sister's continued favour to himself, made Mr. Sharpe thus raise his bold eyes to the daughter of the house, aware that she was almost unprotected; her maternal uncle, Sir Harry, was an old and well-nigh helpless man, and her brother had yet to run the risks of war in that land now deemed the grave of armies—the Soudan.
Apart from her beauty of mind and person—not that Mr. Hawkey Sharpe cared much about the former or was influenced thereby—the latter certainly allured him, and the helplessness referred to encouraged him in his pretensions, even when he began to suspect that there was another in the field, though he knew not yet precisely who that other was.
Mr. Sharpe's antecedents were not brilliant. He had begun life in a solicitor's office in Glasgow, but had learned more than law elsewhere; book-making, betting, the race-course, and billiards had brought him in contact with his betters in rank but equals in mischief and roguery, and from them he had acquired a certain factitious polish of manner, which he hoped now to turn to good account.
Maude Lindsay knew and believed in that which Roland struggled against knowing and believing, the precise tenor of their father's will; and in terror of precipitating matters with Sharpe and his sister, she had been compelled to temporize and submit to the more than effusive politeness of the former, whose bearing, however, she could not mistake.
In nothing, as yet, had he gone beyond those—in him, somewhat clumsy—tendernesses of incipient love-making, which might, or might not, mean anything, though Maude felt that they meant too much; and she never forgot the shock, the start, the humiliating conviction that she experienced when the necessity of regarding him as a lover was forced by necessity upon her.
Her disdain she utterly failed, at first, to conceal; but Hawkey Sharpe, whose reading had taught him, through the perusal of many low and exciting love stories, that a girl might be won in spite of her teeth, was resolved to persevere.
'Good-evening, Mr. Sharpe—what a start you gave me!' said Maude, essaying to pass him in the narrow corridor; but he contrived to bar her way.
'Pardon me for a moment,' said he submissively enough; 'I wish you would not call me Mr. Sharpe; and oh, more than all, that you would permit me to—to call you Maude!'