"I think I will, Margaret; I think I will," she answered, raising for a moment her wet eyes. "It will mortify my pride and my self-esteem: be always mortifying them; and I shall need a great deal of patience to bear."
"But you will be able to bear; to bear all; you know where to go for help. Do this, Lucy; and see if in the future you do not find your reward. In after years, it may be that your heart will go up with, a great bound of joy and thankfulness. 'I did as Margaret told me,' you will say, 'and bore.' Oh, if men and women did but know the future that they lay up for themselves according as their acts shall be!--the remorse or the peace."
Lucy rose and kissed her. "It shall be so, Margaret," she whispered. And she went away without another word.
She strove to keep the best side uppermost in her mind as she went home. Her resolution was taken; and, perhaps because it was taken, the temptation to act otherwise and to choose revenge, rose up in all manner of attractive colours. She could abandon her ill-doing husband and start, even that night, for her parents' home; reveal the whole, and claim their protection against him. This would be to uphold her pride and her womanly self-respect: but oh, how it would pain them! And they had given their consent to the marriage against their better judgment for her sake; so to say, against their own will. No; she could not, for very shame, tell them, and she prayed again that they might never know it.
"I can take all the pain upon myself, and bear it without sign for their sakes," she mentally cried. "Oh yes, and for mine, for the exposure would kill me. I can bear this; I must take it up as my daily and nightly cross; but I could not bear that my own dear father and mother, or the dear friends of my girlhood, should know he is faithless to me--that he never could have loved me. Theresa, the only one cognisant of it, will be silent for my sake."
Bitter though the decision was, Lucy could but choose it. She had believed Karl Andinnian to be one of the few good men of the earth; she had made him her idol; all had seen it. To let them know that the idol had fallen from his pedestal, and so fallen, would reflect its slighting disgrace on her, and be more than human nature could encounter.
Her interview with Sir Karl took place that evening. She had managed, save at dinner, to avoid his presence until then. It was held in her dressing-room at the dusk hour. He came up to know why she stayed there alone and what she was doing. In truth, she had been schooling herself for this very interview, which had to be got over before she went to rest. The uncertainty of what she could say was troubling her, even the very words she should use caused her perplexity. In her innate purity, her sensitively refined nature, she could not bring herself to speak openly to her husband upon topics of this unpleasant kind. That fact rendered the explanation more incomplete and complicated than it would otherwise have been. He had come up, and she nerved herself to the task. As good enter on it now as an hour later.
"I--I want to speak to you, Sir Karl."
He was standing by the open window, and turned his head quickly. Sir Karl! "What's amiss, Lucy?" he asked.
"I--I--I know all about your secret at the Maze," she said with a great burst of emotion, her chest heaving, her breath coming in gasps.