Lady Blake was too surprised to speak—and so, for once doing the wise thing, she remained silent.
Rose, hurrying out a moment later, saw that the open air had already done them both good.
CHAPTER XXIV
“You’ve got to make him believe that you wish for the marriage to take place now, for your own sake, not for his.”
It was with those words, uttered by Sir Jacques Robey, still sounding in her ears, that Rose Otway walked up to the door of the room where Jervis Blake, having just seen his father, was now waiting to see her.
Sir John Blake’s brief “He has taken it very well. He has a far greater sense of discipline than I had at his age,” had been belied, discounted, by the speaker’s own look of suffering and of revolt.
Rose waited outside the door for a few moments. She was torn with conflicting fears and emotions. A strange feeling of oppression and shyness had come over her. It had seemed so easy to say that she would be married at once, to-morrow, to Jervis. But she had not known that she would have to ask Jervis’s consent. She had supposed, foolishly, that it would all be settled for her by Sir Jacques....
At last she turned the handle of the door, and walked through into the room. And then, to her unutterable relief, she saw that Jervis looked exactly as usual, except that his face, instead of being pale, as it had been the last few days, was rather flushed.
Words which had been spoken to him less than five minutes ago were also echoing in Jervis’s brain, pushing everything else into the background. He had said, “I suppose you think that I ought to offer to release Rose?” and his father had answered slowly: “All I can say is that I should do so—if I were in your place.”
But now, when he saw her coming towards him, looking as she always looked, save that something of the light and brightness which had always been in her dear face had faded out of it, he knew that he could say nothing of the sort. This great trouble which had come on him was her trouble as well as his, and he knew she was going to take it and to bear it, as he meant to take it and to bear it.