“No, mademoiselle; but what of Monsieur Beresford? He wrote to M. Albrech, too; he will get an answer; he will know.”
“Of course,” Queenie said, impatiently. “But I can trust him. I shall tell him to keep silent; and now leave me, and do not let Mrs. Jerry, or any one, come near me. I am tired, and shall soon retire.”
So Pierre left her alone with her thoughts, which kept her awake the most of the night, and the next morning found her suffering with one of her head-aches, and unable to leave her bed. It was a stormy November day, and the wind blew in gusts over the hill, and drove before it clouds of snow, which was drifting down from the gray sky in great white feathery masses, but bad as was the day, it did not prevent Mr. Beresford from riding over to Hetherton Place, where he was met by Pierre with the message that Miss Hetherton had the headache, and could not see him. Mr. Beresford seemed disappointed, and was about turning away from the door, when he said, as if it had just occurred to him:
“By the way, do you know if Miss Hetherton received any letters from France yesterday?”
“She did receive one,” Pierre said, looking straight at the lawyer, and feeling sure that he, too, had heard from Mentone, and knew the secret of Christine Bodine.
And he was right, for the same mail which brought the letter to Reinette had also in it one for Mr. Beresford from Mentone. It was a curious compound of English and French, which took Mr. Beresford nearly two hours to decipher. But he managed it at last with the help of grammar and dictionary, and had a tolerably accurate knowledge of its contents, which surprised and confounded him almost as much as Queenie’s letter had confounded her. But in his letter were a few words, or rather insinuations, which were omitted in Queenie’s and which affected him more than all the rest, and threw a flood of light upon Mrs. La Rue’s reason for keeping her identity with Christine Bodine a secret from Reinette. Did Queenie know what he knew or suspected, Mr. Beresford wondered, and if so, how did she take it? What would she do? A burning, intense desire seized the usually calm, sober lawyer to have these questions answered. He must see Reinette and judge from her face how much she knew, and so he went to Hetherton Place. But Queenie would not see him. She was sick, and she had received a letter from France. So much he learned, and he rode back to his office, where, for the remainder of the day, he seemed in a most abstracted frame of mind, paying but little attention to his clients, who had never seen him so absent-minded and grave before, and wondered of what he was thinking. Not of them and their business, but of Reinette and the change her coming to Merrivale had made in his hitherto quiet life. How she had turned everything upside down. It was like a romance whose pages he was reading, and now a fresh leaf had been turned which he wished to decipher, and since he could not see Reinette he must seek help in another quarter, and he, who had always been noted for minding his own business better than any man in Merrivale, waited impatiently for evening, when he meant to begin the new chapter.
CHAPTER XXX.
TRYING TO READ THE PAGE.
The night set in dark and stormy even for November and the wind howled dismally through the tall elms which grew upon the common, while both sleet and rain were falling pitilessly, when Mr. Beresford left his office, equipped for an evening call. He was going to see Margery La Rue, whom he found alone, as her mother had retired to her room with a toothache and swollen face. Margery let him in herself, and looked fully the surprise she felt when she saw who her visitor was. It was not so much that he should come that night as that he should come at all which astonished the young girl, who, with a woman’s intuition, had read the proud man pretty accurately, and guessed that persons like her, whose bread was earned by their own hands, had not much attraction for him. But it was his early training, which was at fault, and not the real heart of the man himself. His mother had seldom done so much for herself as to arrange her own hair, and when her immense fortune slipped away from her, and left her comparatively poor, and compelled her sons, two as noble boys as ever called a woman mother, to choose professions and care for themselves, she could not bear the change, and with a feeling that she would rather die than live and work, she died, and very few mourned for her. With such a mother and a long line of ancestry on her side, as proud and exclusive as herself, it is not strange that Mr. Beresford should have imbibed some notions not altogether consistent with democratic institutions. He thought a great deal of family and blood, and though he was always polite and courteous to Margery when they met, he had unconsciously made her feel the gulf between them, and she had good cause to gaze on him wonderingly as she opened the door, and held it open a moment as if expecting him to give her some message from Queenie, as he had done when Phil went away. Laughing good-humoredly as he stepped past her into the hall, he said:
“I am coming in, you see, though I do not wonder that a call on such a wild night as this surprises you. But it is the weather which brings me here. I believe I have had the blues or something to-day, and need to talk to some one, and as Phil is gone, and Reinette is sick, I have come to call on you. I hope I am not unwelcome.”