“His lordship walked out an hour ago with the colonel. It’s quite unbeknown what time they may come in.”
In her shrinking dread of the interview, it almost seemed a relief. Strange to say, so fully absorbed had she been in the anticipated pain, that the contingency of his being out had not crossed her mind. The man stood with the door in his hand, half open, half closed; had he invited her to walk in and sit down, she might have done so, for the sake of the rest. But he did not.
Retracing her steps down the path, she branched off into a dark walk, overshadowed by trees, just within the entrance-gate, and sat down upon a bench. Now the reaction was coming; the disappointment: all that mental agony, all that weary way of fatigue, and not to see him! It must all be gone over again on the morrow.
She threw back her veil; she pressed her throbbing forehead against the trunk of the old oak tree: and in that same moment some one entered the gate on his way to the house, saw her, and turned round to approach her. It was Lord Averil.
Had the moment really come? Every drop of blood in her body seemed to rush to her heart, and send it on with a tumultuous bound; every sense of the mind seemed to leave her; every fear that the imagination can conjure up seemed to rise in menace. She rose to her feet and gazed at him, her sight partially leaving her, her face changing to a ghastly whiteness.
But when he hastened forward and caught her hands in the deepest respect and sympathy; when he bent over her, saying some confused words—confused to her ear—of surprise at seeing her, of pity for her apparent illness; when he addressed her with every token of the old kindness, the consideration of bygone days, then the revulsion of feeling overcame her, and Maria burst into a flood of distressing tears, and sobbed passionately.
“I am fatigued with the walk,” she said, with a lame attempt at apology, when her emotion was subsiding. “I came over to speak to you, Lord Averil. I—I have something to ask you.”
“But you should not have walked,” he answered in a kindly tone of remonstrance. “Why did you not drop me a note? I would have come to you.”
She felt as one about to faint. She had taken off her gloves, and her small white hands were unconsciously writhing themselves together in her lap, showing how great was her inward pain; her trembling lips, pale with agitation, refused to bring out their words connectedly.
“I want to ask you to be merciful to my husband. Not to prosecute him.”