“Yes,” he said. “We are a queer pair. I suppose we are really both a little mad. I wish there was someone we could go to.”
“Couldn’t you—perhaps—” said Lacrima, “say something to Mrs. Seldom? And yet I would much rather she didn’t know. I would much rather no one knew!”
“I might,” murmured Maurice thoughtfully; “I might tell her. But the unlucky thing is, she is so narrow-minded that she can’t separate you in her thoughts from those frightful people.”
“Shall I try Vennie?” whispered the girl, “or shall we—” here she looked him boldly in the face with eager, brightening eyes—“shall we run away to London, and be married, and risk the future?”
Poor little Italian! She had never made a greater tactical blunder than when she uttered these words. Maurice Quincunx’s mystic illumination had made it possible for him to exorcise his evil spirit. It could not put into his nature an energy he had not been born with. His countenance clouded.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he remarked. “You don’t know what a sour-tempered devil I am, and how I am sure to make any girl who lives with me miserable. You would hate me in a month more than you hate Mr. Romer, and in a year I should have either worried you into your grave or you would have run away from me. No—no—no! I should be a criminal fool to let you subject yourself to such a risk as that.”
“But,” pleaded the girl, with flushed cheeks, “we should be sure to find something! I could teach Italian,—and you could—oh, I am sure there are endless things you could do! Please, please, Maurice dear, let us go. Anything is better than this misery. I have got quite enough money for the journey. Look!”
She pulled out from beneath her dress a little chain purse, that hung, by a small silver chain, round her slender neck. She opened it and shook three sovereigns into the palm of her hand. “Enough for the journey,” she said, “and enough to keep us for a week if we are economical. We should be sure to find something by that time.”
Mr. Quincunx shook his head. It was an ironical piece of psychic malice that the very illumination which had made him remorseful and sympathetic should have also reduced to the old level of tender sentiment the momentary passion he had felt. It was the absence in him of this sensual impulse which made the scheme she proposed seem so impossible. Had he been of a more animal nature, or had she possessed the power of arousing his senses to a more violent craving, instead of brooding, as he did, upon the mere material difficulties of such a plan, he would have plunged desperately into it and carried her off without further argument. The very purity of his temperament was her worst enemy.
Poor Lacrima! Her hands dropped once more helplessly to her side, and the old hopeless depression began to invade her heart. It seemed impossible to make her friend realize that if she refused the farmer and things went on as before, her position in Mr. Romer’s establishment would become more impossible than ever. What—for instance—would become of her when this long-discussed marriage of Gladys with young Ilminster took place? Could she conceive herself going on living under that roof, with Mr. Romer continually harassing her, and his brother-in-law haunting every field she wandered into?