‘Now I shall go,’ she remarked.
‘All right!’ said he. ‘But listen to me, Magdalen; you must let me see you home, and I’ll tell you the meaning of this.’
‘As if I required to know the meaning of it!’ she said, bitterly. ‘It is pure malice and viciousness on your part, Otho. Meaning, indeed!’
‘You know nothing in the world about it.’
‘I cannot talk about it now. I am not going to enter into an argument with you. You have made me feel ill already.’
‘Then settle matters by promising that I shall go home with you; or I vow you shall hear me in this very room. I intend to have it out with you to-night, do you hear?’
‘Very well—as we go home,’ said Magdalen, very coldly.
And, as the door opened to admit the returning performers, and the interval had begun, they took their way to the concert-room, and joined their party.
CHAPTER XXVI
HER HEART’S DESIRE
When the Thorsgarth carriage had driven away, and the Balder Hall one came up, Otho handed Magdalen in, followed her, shut the window, and turned to her. After the bright light around the concert-room door, they seemed suddenly to plunge into utter and outer darkness, and Magdalen was glad of it, for she would not have had Otho see her face now for a great deal of money,—perhaps not even if his seeing it would have secured to her the object for which she had toiled so long and so unsuccessfully—the position of his wife. She did not know what he was going to say to her, but she believed she could guess. She believed that the new line she had lately taken towards him—to-night, and on one or two other occasions recently—had so angered his imperious and exacting temper that he was now going to tell her that their friendship was at an end, unless she would submit to take a lower position with regard to him than she had yet done. She knew—she had been so unhappy as to have to consider the subject, in reckoning with herself about Otho and his ‘intentions’—she knew that she had no ‘dishonourable’ proposal to fear from him. She had maintained always a footing distinctly forbidding such possibilities; but she dreaded and feared that he had shaken off what influence she had had over him—that he found he could exist without the counsel and advice for which he had often come to her, and which he professed, had often been of service to him. She believed he was angry that she had dared to thwart him in a whim which he considered to be harmless, and a kind of amusing joke, and that after making the bizarre and humiliating exhibition of himself, her, and Ada, which he had accomplished this evening, he was now going to let her understand that he was about to shake off her influence once and for all. And what was it that she experienced in this idea? Scarcely what might have been expected. Neither anger, contempt, nor indignation, but grief, sorrow, soreness; a yearning unwillingness to part, and a dread of the days when she should not see him; an almost passionate speculation as to whether she could not concede something—keep the man at her side, somehow.