She had turned from red to pale as he spoke. She stood before him in the winter light, with her colour changing, her hands tightly clasped, her eyes cast down, and tears trembling on the long dark lashes.
“You have no right to question me. It is enough for you to have my honest answer. I esteem you, but I do not love you; and it distresses me when you talk of love.”
“There is some one else, then! I knew it. There is some one else. For me you are marble. You are fire for him. He is in your heart. You have said it.”
“How dare you——” she began.
“Why should I shrink from warning you of your danger? It is Fareham you love. I have seen you tremble at his touch—start at the sound of his footstep—that step you know so well. His footstep? Why, the very air he breathes carries to you the consciousness of his approach. Oh, I have watched you both, Angela; and I know, I know. Jealous pangs have racked me, day after day; yet I have hung on. I have been very patient. ‘She knows not the sinful impulses of her own heart,’ I said, ‘knows not in her purity how near she goes to a fall. Here, in her sister’s house, passionately loved by her sister’s husband! She calls him ‘brother,’ whose eyes cannot look at her without telling their story of wicked love. She walks on the edge of a precipice—self-deceived. Were I to abandon her she might fall. My affection is her only safeguard; and by winning her to myself I shall snatch her from the pit of hell.’”
It was the truth he was telling her. Yes; even when Fareham was harshest, she had been dimly conscious that love was at the root of his unkindness. The coldness that had held them apart since that midnight meeting had been ice over fire. It was jealousy that had made him so angry. No word of love, directly spoken, had ever offended her ear; but there had been many a speech of double meaning that had set her wondering and thinking.
And, oh! the guilt of it, when an honourable man like Denzil set her sin before her, in plain language. She stood aghast at her own wickedness. That which had been a sin of thought only, a secret sorrow, wrestled with in many an hour of heartfelt prayer, with all the labour of a soul that sought heavenly aid against earthly temptation, was conjured into hideous reality by Denzil’s plain speech. To love her sister’s husband, to suffer his guilty love, to know gladness only in his company, to be exquisitely happy were he but in the same room with her—to sink to profoundest melancholy when he was absent. Oh, the sin of it! In what degree did her guilt differ from that of the women of the Court, who had each her open secret in some base intrigue that all the world knew and laughed at? She had been kept aloof from that libertine crew; but was she any better than they? Was Fareham, who openly scorned the royal debauchee, was he any better than the King?
She remembered how he had talked of Lord Sandwich, making excuses for a perverted love. She had heard him speak of other offenders in the same strain. He had been ever ready to recognise fatality where a good Catholic would have perceived only sin.
“Angela, believe me, you are drifting helmless in perilous waters,” Denzil urged, while she stood beside him in mute distress. “Let me be your strong rock. Only give me the promise of your hand. I can be patient still. I will give time for love to grow. Grant me but the right to guard you from the danger of an unholy passion that is always near you in this house.”
“You pretend to be his lordship’s friend, and you speak slander of him.”