"Pshaw! my dear Roland, have I not already told you that my authority is the common Graybridge gossip?"
"I'll not believe that. You are the last man in the world to be influenced by paltry village scandal. You have better grounds for what you told me. Some one has seen Isabel and this man. Who was that person?"
"I protest against this cross-examination. I have been weak enough to sympathize with a dishonourable attachment, so far as to wish to spare you pain. You refuse to be spared, and must take the consequences of your own obstinacy. I was the person who saw Isabel Gilbert walking with a stranger—a showily-dressed disreputable-looking fellow—in Nessborough Hollow. I had been dining with Hardwick the lawyer at Graybridge, and rode home across country by the Briargate and Hurstonleigh Road, instead of going through Waverly. I heard the scandal about Mrs. Gilbert at Graybridge,—heard her name linked with that of some stranger staying at the Leicester Arms, Nessborough Hollow, who had been known to send letters to her and to meet her after dark. Heaven only knows how country people find out these things; but these things always are discovered somehow or other. I defended Isabel,—I know her head is a good one, though by no means so well balanced as it might be,—I defended Isabel throughout a long discussion with the lawyer's wife; but riding home by the Briargate Road, I met Mrs. Gilbert walking arm-in-arm with a man who answered to the description I had heard at Graybridge."
"When was this?"
"The night before last. It must have been some time between ten and eleven when I met them, for it was broad moonlight, and I saw Isabel's face as plainly as I see yours."
"And did she recognize you?"
"Yes; and turned abruptly away from the road into the waste grass between the highway and the tall hedgerow beyond."
For some moments after this there was a dead silence, and Raymond saw the young man standing opposite him in the dusk, motionless as a stone figure—white as death. Then after that pause, which seemed so long, Roland stretched out his hand and groped among the decanters and glasses on the table for a water-jug; he filled a goblet with water; and Charles Raymond knew, by the clashing of the glass, that his kinsman's hand was shaken by a convulsive trembling; After taking a long draught of water, Roland stretched his hand across the table.
"Shake hands, Raymond," he said, in a dull, thick kind of voice; "I thank you heartily for having told me the truth; it was much better to be candid; it was better to let me know the truth. But, oh, if you could know how I loved her—if you could know! You think it was only the dishonourable passion of a profligate, who falls in love with a married woman, and pursues his fancy, heedless of the ruin he may entail on others. But it was not, Raymond; it was nothing like that. So help me Heaven, amidst all selfish sorrow for my own most bitter disappointment, I have sometimes felt a thrill of happiness in the thought that my poor girl's name was still untarnished. I have felt this, in spite of my ruined life, the cruel destruction of every hope that had grown up out of my love for her; and to think that she,—that she who saw my truth and my despair, saw my weak heart laid bare in all its abject folly,—to think that she would dismiss me with school-girl speeches about duty and honour; and then,—then, when my grief was new,—while I still lingered here, too infatuated to leave the place in which I had so cruelly suffered,—to think that she should fall into some low intrigue, some base and secret association with——. It is too bitter, Raymond; it is too bitter!"
The friendly dusk sheltered him as he dropped into a chair and buried his face upon the broad-cushioned elbow. The tears that gathered slowly in his eyes now were even more bitter than those that he had shed two months ago under Lord Thurston's oak. If this sort of thing is involved in a man's being in earnest, he had not need be in earnest about anything more than once in his life. Happily for us, the power to suffer, like every other power, becomes enfeebled and wears out at last by extravagant usage. If Othello had survived to marry a second time, he would not have dropped down in a fit when a new Iago began to whisper poisonous hints about the lady.