‘She hates him,’ poor White said, almost crying, ‘but he can’t resist her. He’s mad, ma’am, mad, that’s what it is. He could kill hisself for giving in, but he can’t help hisself. We’ve had to watch him night and day as he shouldn’t hear her nor see her, for when her money’s done she always comes back to him. He’ll kill her some day or kill hisself. Mississarah knows as I’m speaking true.’
‘As true as the Bible,’ said Mississarah; but she was softer than he towards the wife. ‘He was too wise and too good for her, ma’am,’ she said, ‘a fool and a wise man can’t walk together—it’s hard on the wise man, but maybe it’s a bit hard too on the fool. Folks don’t make themselves. She mightn’t have been so bad——’
‘Oh, go along; go along, Mississarah, do,’ said White. ‘We’ll have to go off from here where all was quiet and nice, and start again without knowing no more than Adam. But he’ll kill her, some day, you’ll see, or he’ll kill hisself.’
Mississarah was a north-country woman, and had a little feeling that her master was a foreigner, and therefore necessarily more or less guilty; but White was half a foreigner himself and totally devoted to his master. When they had poured forth their sorrows to me, they went away disconsolate, and their fears about leaving East Cottage were so soon justified that I never saw them more.
And then came my melancholy luncheon, which was set on the table for me, and which I loathed the sight of. To escape from it I went into the drawing-room, from which all traces of last night’s confusion were gone. I was so miserable, and lonely, and weary that I think I dropped asleep over the fire. I had been up almost all night, and there seemed nothing so comfortable in all the world as forgetting one’s very existence and being able to get to sleep.
I woke with the murmur of voices in my ears. Lady Denzil was sitting by me holding my hand. She gave me a kiss, and whispered to me in her soft voice,—‘We know all about it—we know all about it, my dear,’ patting me softly with her kind hand. I’m afraid I broke down and cried like a child. I am growing old myself, to be sure, but Lady Denzil, thank Heaven, might have been even my mother—and if you consider all the agitation, all the disturbance I had come through!
I think everybody on the Green called that day, and each visitor was more kind than the other. ‘I shall always consider it a special providence, however, that none of us called or were introduced to her,’ Mrs. General Perronet said solemnly. But she was the only one who made any allusion to the terrible guest I had been hiding in my house. They took me out to get the air—they made me walk to the Dell to see the autumn colour on the trees. They carried me off to dine at the Lodge, and brought me home with a body-guard. ‘You are not fit to be trusted to walk home by yourself,’ Lottie Stoke said, giving me her arm. In short, the Green received me back with acclamations, as if I had been a returned Prodigal, and I found that I could laugh over the new and most unexpected rôle, which I thus found myself filling, as soon as the next day.
Some time after, I received my shawl in a rough parcel, sent by railway. It was torn in two or three places by the pins it had been fastened with, and had several small stains upon it. It was sent without a word, without any apologies, with Mrs. Reinhardt’s compliments written outside the brown paper cover, in a coarse hand. And that was the only direct communication I ever had with my strange guest. Before Christmas however there was a paragraph in some of the papers that L. Reinhardt, Esq., had volunteered to accompany an expedition going to Africa in order to make some scientific observations. There was a great crowded, enthusiastic meeting of the Geographical Society, in which his wonderful devotion was dwelt on and the sacrifice he was making to the interests of science. And he was even mentioned in the House of Commons, where some great personage took it upon him to say that in the arrangement of the expedition the greatest assistance had been received from Mr. Reinhardt, who, himself a man of wealth and leisure, had generously devoted his energies to it, and smoothed away a great many of the difficulties in the way—a good work for which science and his country would alike be grateful to him, said the orator. Oh, me! oh, me! I looked up in Lady Denzil’s face as Sir Thomas read out these words to us. Sir Thomas took it quite calmly, and was rather pleased indeed that Mr. Reinhardt, by getting himself publicly thanked in the House of Commons, had justified the impulse which prompted himself, Sir Thomas Denzil, head as it were of society on the Green, to call upon him. But my lady laid her soft old hand on mine, and her eyes filled with tears. ‘Do not let us blame him, my dear,—do not let us blame him,’ she said to me when we were alone. She had known what temptation was.