Mr. Quincunx, on the other hand, was most thoroughly alarmed by her opening words. He feared that she was going to propose some desperate scheme by which, fleeing from Nevilton together, she was to help him earn money enough for their mutual support.
“What should I say?” he answered aloud, to the girl’s question. “It would depend upon the manner in which you worked this wonderful miracle. But I warn you I am not hopeful. Things might be worse. After all I have a house to return to. I have food. I have my books. I have you to come and pay me visits. I have my garden. In this world, when a person has a roof over his head, and someone to talk to every other day, he had better remain still and not attract the attention of the gods.”
Silence followed his words. Instead of speaking, Lacrima took off her hat, and smoothed her hair away from her forehead, keeping her eyes fixed upon the ground. An immense temptation seized her to let the moment pass without revealing her secret. She could easily substitute any imaginary suggestion in place of the terrible reality. Her friend’s morbid nerves would help her deception. The matter would be glossed over and be as if it had never been: be, in fact, no more than it was, a hideous nightmare of her own insane and diseased conscience.
But could the thing be so suppressed? Would it be like Nevilton to let even the possible image of such a drama pass unsnatched at by voluble tongues, unenlarged upon by malicious gossip?
He would be bound to hear of Mr. Goring’s offer. That, at least, could not be concealed. And what assurance had she that Mr. Romer would not himself communicate to him the full nature of the hideous bargain? The quarry-owner might think it diplomatic to trade upon Maurice’s weakness.
No—there was no help for it. She must tell him;—only praying now, in the profound depths of her poor heart, that he would not consider such an infamy even for a second. So she told him the whole story, in a low monotonous voice, keeping her head lowered and watching the progress of a minute snail laboriously ascending a stalk of grass.
Maurice Quincunx had never twiddled the point of his Elizabethan beard with more detached absorption than while listening to this astounding narration. When she had quite finished, he regarded her from head to foot with a very curious expression.
The girl breathed hard. What was he thinking? He did not at once, in a burst of righteous indignation, fling the monstrous suggestion to the winds. What was he thinking? As a matter of fact the thoughts of Mr. Quincunx had taken an extraordinary turn.
Being in his personal relation to feminine charm, of a somewhat cold temper, he had never, for all his imaginative sentiment towards his little friend, been at all swayed by any violent sensuous attraction. But the idea of such attraction having seized so strongly upon another person reacted upon him, and he looked at her, perhaps for the first time since they had met, with eyes of something more than purely sentimental regard.