Jules and Adolphe were glad. They showed the young Englishman to his room with joy, making no doubt that the other would follow. But the other did not follow. He sat for a time silently, with his head on his hand. Then he rose, and walking to the other side of the great bouquet of laurels, paused in the profound shadow, where there stood, as he divined rather than saw, a human creature in mysterious anguish, anxiety, and pain. He made out with difficulty a tall shadow against the gloomy background of the close branches. “I do not know who you are,” he said; “I do not ask to know; but you are deeply interested in what that—that young fellow was saying?”
The voice that replied to him was very low. “Oh, more than interested; it is like life and death to me. For God’s sake, tell me if you know anything more.”
“I know nothing to-night—but to-morrow— You are the lady whom I met in Spain two years ago, whose portrait stands on Rosalind Trevanion’s writing-table.”
There was a low cry; “Oh! God bless you for telling me! God bless you for telling me!” and the sound of a suppressed sob.
“I shall see her to-morrow,” he said. “I have come thousands of miles to see her. It is possible that I might be of use to you. May I tell her that you are here?”
The stir among the branches seemed to take a different character as he spoke, and the lady came out towards the partial light. She said firmly, “No; I thank you for your kind intentions;” then paused. “You will think it strange that I came behind you and listened. You will think it was not honorable. But I heard their name, and Roland Hamerton knows me. When a woman is in great trouble she is driven to strange expedients. Sir,” she cried, after another agitated pause, “I neither know your name nor who you are, but if you will bring me news to-morrow after you have seen them—if you will tell me—it will be a good deed—it will be a Christian deed.”
“Say something more to me than that,” he cried, with a passion that surprised himself; “say that you will wish me well.”
She moved along softly, noiselessly, with her head turned to him, moving towards the moonlight, which was like the blaze of day, within a few steps from where they had been standing. The impression which had been upon his mind of a fugitive—a woman abandoned and forlorn—died out so completely that he felt ashamed ever to have ventured upon such a thought. And he felt, with a sudden sense of imperfection quite unfamiliar to him, that he was being examined and judged. He felt, too, with an acute self-consciousness, that the silver in his hair shone in the white light, and that the counterbalancing qualities of fine outline and manly color must be wanting in that wan and colorless illumination. He could not see her face, except as an abstract paleness, turned towards him, over-shadowed by the veil which she had put back, but which still threw a deep shade; but she gazed into his, which he could not but turn towards her in the full light of the moon. The end of the examination was not very consolatory to his pride. She sighed and turned away. “The man whom she chooses will want no other blessing,” she said.
A few minutes after Jules and Adolphe were happy, shutting up the doors, putting out the lights, betaking themselves to the holes and corners under the stairs, under the roofs, in which these sufferers for the good of humanity slept.