Nurse looked fixedly at her mistress in the light of the candle which Nelly had just lighted, and which came to life in a sudden glare upon her agitated face. "Yes, ma'am," she said quietly, beginning to dress.
What a strange agitated scene in the middle of the silent night! The man below could not have been more dismayed by the appearance of a band of soldiers than he was by the quiet, respectable, respectful maid-servant who came in with a candle to show him to his room, and whose polite determination to get rid of him, to put out the lamp and see that everything was safe for the night, was full of the most perfect calm. "I'll go up-stairs presently; but you need not wait," he said. "Oh, sir, I don't mind waiting; but my mistress likes me to see the lights out. I'll be in the next room when you are ready, sir, to show you the way."
He was moved at last to ask impatiently, "Is not Mrs Brunton coming down-stairs again?"
"Oh dear no, sir; my mistress is passing the night in the nursery, for Master Jack is a little feverish, and he never will part with his mamma when once he sees her. If she offered to go away he'd scream so, he'd raise the whole house."
Fitzroy glared at this guardian of the little helpless household—a very respectful, very obliging maid-servant—making light of the trouble a nocturnal visitor gave. He could no more have resisted or insulted this woman than if she had been a queen. He followed her quite humbly to his room, not daring to say a word. He might as well have been in a hotel, he said bitterly to himself.
When nurse went back she found poor Nelly sitting on the floor between the two little beds, her head leaning on one of them, holding fast the rail of the other, and weeping as if her heart would break.
Next morning Mr Fitzroy left the cottage early, without asking to see Mrs Brunton. It was, indeed, too early to disturb the lady of the house.
CHAPTER VII.
Mrs Brunton woke next morning with an aching head and a confused mind, not knowing for a moment what had happened to her. Was it a nightmare? a dreadful dream? She had not slept till morning, and then had fallen into an unrestful torpor, full of the broken reminiscences of the night. A nightmare! that was most like what it was—until she came to herself all at once, and remembered everything.
Everything! and yet did not in the least understand. What had been the meaning of it all? It was more like a nightmare than ever as all the different incidents come back upon her mind. The lingering, the wild talk—the question, "Must I go away?" The cry "I love you. I adore——" and nurse coming in to save her mistress perhaps from wilder utterances still. "Was it indispensable that he should go by the last train?" What a question! Was it not indispensable—more! exacted by every feeling, by every necessity? "I love you, I adore——" Oh yes, these words made poor Nelly's heart beat; but they were not words a man should have said in the silence of the night to a woman without any protection, with a wild heart leaping and struggling in her bosom, and to whose code of possible existence something else, something very different, was needful. Was it indispensable?—oh! it was not, it was not that, a man should have asked. He might love her, but what kind of love was it to humble a woman in her own esteem, to make her ask herself, "What have I done, oh what have I done, that I should be spoken to so?" Nelly did not think of her reputation, of honour, or, as he dared to suggest, of what people might say. Mrs Grundy! That was all very well for the light follies that mean nothing, the laughing transgression of a formal rule. But the shock of his look, the horror of his return, struck at her very being. It seemed to her that she could die of shame only to remember it. And what could he think of her? Was it indispensable? Had not she left the window open for him? Had she not known he would come back?