“Ah, Mr. Angerstyne, how sly you were, not to tell us!” cried Mrs. Lewis, playfully shaking her fan at him. “You—— Oh, goodness me!”
A loud crash! Jenny the maid had dropped a hot vegetable dish on the floor, scattering the pieces and spilling the peas; and followed it up with a shriek and a scream. That took off the attention; and Mr. Angerstyne, coolly eating away at his bread, turned to make some passing remark to Anne.
But the words he would have said were left unspoken. No ghost ever seen, in cloisters or out of them, was whiter than she. Lips and fingers were alike trembling.
“You should be more careful!” he called to the maid in a tone of authority. “Ladies don’t care to be startled in this way.” Just as though Anne had turned white from the noise of the broken dish!
Well, it had been a dreadful revelation for her. All the sunshine of this world seemed to have gone out for ever; to have left nothing behind it but a misty darkness. Rallying her pride and her courage, she went on with her dinner, as the others did. Her head was throbbing, her brain on fire; her mind had turned to chaos. She heard them making arrangements for a picnic-party to the woods at Croome on the morrow; not in the least understanding what was said or planned.
“You did surprise us!” observed Mrs. Lewis to Lady Knight, when they were in the drawing-room after dinner, and Mr. Angerstyne had gone out to post his letters. “What could have been his motive for allowing us to think him a bachelor?”
“A dislike to mention her name,” replied Lady Knight, candidly. “That was it, I expect. He married her for her pretty face, and then found out what a goose she was. So they did not get on together. She goes her way, and he goes his; now and then they meet for a week or two, but it is not often.”
“What a very unsatisfactory state of things!” cried Miss Dinah, handing round the cups of coffee herself for fear of another upset. “Is it her fault or his?”
“Faults lie on both sides,” said Lady Knight, who had an abrupt way of speaking, and was as poor as a church mouse. “She has a fearfully affronting temper of her own; those women with dolls’ faces sometimes have; and he was not as forbearing as he might have been. Any way, that is the state of affairs between Mr. and Mrs. Angerstyne: and, apart from it, there’s no scandal or reproach attaching to either of them.”
Anne, sitting in a quiet corner, listened to all this mechanically. What mattered the details to her? the broad fact had been enough. The hum of conversation was going on all around; her father, looking somewhat the better for his dinner, was playing at backgammon with Tom Lake. She saw nothing, knew nothing, until Mr. Angerstyne dropped into the seat beside her.