“Her interest!” cried Miss Lockwood, starting up in her chair. “Oh! you poor, mean-spirited creature! Call yourself a man, and let yourself be treated like a dog—that’s your nature, is it? I suppose they’ve made you a pension, or something, to keep you crawling and toadying. I shouldn’t wonder,” she said, stopping suddenly, “if you were to offer me a good round sum to compromise the business, or an allowance for life—?”
“I shall do nothing of the kind,” said Edgar, quietly. She stared at him for a moment, panting—and then, in the effort to speak, was seized upon by a violent fit of coughing, which shook her fragile figure, and convulsed her suddenly-crimsoned face. “Can I get you anything?” he asked, rising with an impulse of pity. She shook her head, and waved to him with her hand to sit down again. Does the reader remember how Christian in the story had vile thoughts whispered into his ear, thrown into his mind, which were none of his? Profoundest and truest of parables! Into Edgar’s mind, thrown there by some devil, came a wish and a hope; he did not originate them, but he had to undergo them, writhing within himself with shame and horror. He wished that she might die, that Clare might thus be saved from exposure, at least from outward ruin, from the stigma upon herself and upon her children, which nothing else could avert. The wish ran through him while he sat helpless, trying with all the struggling powers of his mind to reject it. Few of us, I suspect, have escaped a similar experience. It was not his doing, but he had to bear the consciousness of this inhuman thought.
When Miss Lockwood had struggled back to the power of articulation, she turned to him again, with an echo of her jaunty laugh.
“They say I’m in a consumption,” she said; “don’t you believe it. I’ll see you all out, mind if I don’t. We’re a long-lived family. None of us ever were known to have anything the matter with our chests.”
“Have you spoken to a doctor?” said Edgar, with so deep a remorseful compunction that it made his tone almost tender in kindness.
“Oh! the doctor—he speaks to me!” she said. “I tell the young ladies he’s fallen in love with me. Oh! that ain’t so unlikely neither! Men as good have done it before now; but I wouldn’t have anything to say to him,” she continued, with her usual laugh. “I don’t make any brag of it, but I never forget as I’m a married woman. I don’t mind a little flirtation, just for amusement; but no man has ever had it in his power to brag that he’s gone further with me.”
Then there was a pause, for disquiet began to resume its place in Edgar’s mind, and the poor creature before him had need of rest to regain her breath. She opened the book she held in her hand, and pushed to him across the table some written memoranda.
“There’s where my chapel is as I was married in,” she said, “and there’s—it’s nothing but a copy, so, if you destroy it, it won’t do me any harm—the Scotch certificate. They were young folks that signed it, no older than myself, so be sure you’ll find them, if you want to. There, I’ve given you all that’s needed to prove what I say, and if you don’t clear me, I’ll tell the Master, that’s all, and he’ll do it, fast enough! Your fine Mrs. Arden, forsooth, that has no more right to be Mrs. Arden than you had to be Squire, won’t get off, don’t you think it, for now my blood’s up. I know what Arthur will do,” she cried, getting excited again. “He’s a man of sense, and a man of the world, he is. He’ll come to me on his knees, and offer a good big lump of money, or a nice allowance. Oh! I know him! He ain’t a poor, mean-spirited cur, to lick the hand that cuffs him, or to go against his own interest, like you.”
Here another fit of coughing came on, worse than the first. Edgar, compassionate, took up the paper, and left the room.
“I am afraid Miss Lockwood is ill. Will you send some one to her?” he said, to the first young lady he met.