She looked at him, and for an instant there was silence. His countenance was not so stern and impassive as she had once before seen it, but its expression was even more unpromising. It bespoke extreme annoyance and surprise, “disgusted surprise,” said Mary to herself; “he thinks me lost to all sense of propriety, I can see.”
She could not see her own face; she was unconscious of the pale anxiety which overspread it, of the wistful questioning in the brown eyes which Mr Cheviott remembered so bright and sunny; she could not know that it would have needed a more than hard heart, an actually cruel one, not to be touched by the intensity in her young face—by the pathos of her position of appeal.
At first some instinct—a not unchivalrous instinct either—urged Mr Cheviott to refrain from a direct reply to Mary’s unmistakably direct attack.
“Will she not regret this fearfully afterwards?” he said to himself. “When she finds that I remain quite untouched, when she decides, as she must, that I am a brute! I will give her time to draw back by showing her the uselessness of all this before she commits herself further.”
But Mary saw his hesitation, and it deepened the resentment with which she heard his reply.
“Miss Western,” he said, “you must be under some extraordinary delusion. I will not pretend entire ignorance of what your words—words that, of course, from a lady I cannot resent—of what your words refer to, but pray stop before you say more. I ventured once before to try to warn you—or rather another through you, and this, I suppose, has led to your taking this—this very unusual step,” (“what a mean brute I am making of myself,” he said to himself, “but it is the kindest in the end to show her the hopelessness at once”)—“under, I must repeat, some delusion, or rather complete misapprehension of my possible influence in the matter.”
Mary was silent.
“You must allow me to remind you,” continued Mr Cheviott, hating himself, or the self he was obliged to make himself appear, more and more with each word he uttered, “that you are very young and inexperienced, and little attentions—passing trivialities, in fact, which more worldly-wise young ladies would attach no significance to, may have acquired a mistaken importance with you and your sister. I am very sorry—very sorry that any one connected with me should have acted so thoughtlessly; but you must allow, Miss Western, that I warned you—Went out of my way to warn you, as delicately as I knew how, when I saw the danger of—of—any mistake being made.”
Mary heard him out. Then she looked up again, with no appeal this time in her eyes, but in its stead righteous wrath and indignation.
“You are not speaking the truth,” she said, “at least, what you are inferring is not the truth. If it were the case that Captain Beverley’s ‘attentions’ to my sister were so trifling and meaningless—such as he may have paid to other girls scores of times—why did you go out of your way to warn us? It could not possibly have been out of respect for us; you knew and cared as little about us as we about you, and if you had said it was out of any care for us, the saying so would have been an unwarrantable freedom. No, Mr Cheviott, you knew Captain Beverley was in earnest, and your pride took fright lest he should make so poor a marriage. That is the truth, but I wish you had not made matters worse by denying it.”