“Oh, Letitia, what could I do? Your own brother.”
“My own brother—such a pleasant visitor, don’t you think?—such a credit to us all—without even an evening coat—like a clown, like a blackguard, like a navvy—— Oh, my patience!” cried Letitia, whose eyes were starting from her head and who had no patience at all. “But I know why you did it,” she added after an angry pause to get breath. “Oh, I remember well enough. It’s not for nothing you’re an old maid, Mary Hill! Don’t I know that you’ve had him in your mind all the while.”
Mary, though she was so mild, was being driven beyond the power of self-restraint. She was all the more easily shaken perhaps that there was a certain truth in it. It was true that Ralph Ravelstone had never been forgotten—and that his shadow had come between her and the only marriage she had ever had it in her power to make—but not, oh, not as he appeared now.
“I think,” she said with some gentle dignity, “that it is very improper of you to say anything of the kind. If I am an old maid it’s at least by my own will, and not because I could not help it.” Mary was very mild, and yet she felt that standing upon the platform of that proposal which was the one instance past in her life of the last years, it was hard to be assailed as an old maid by one who knew her so well.
Letitia stood for a moment surprised—scarcely believing her ears. That Mary should have turned upon her! It was like the proverbial worm that sometimes at unexpected moments will turn when nobody is thinking of it. “I know as well as you do that you refused a good offer. What was it made you do it. Oh, I can see through you, though you don’t think so. I always suspected it, and now I know it. But what did you expect to gain by bringing him here. Why should he be brought here? If you had ever told me, if I had known! a man who has been ten years in the bush, a man with a hand like that, and not an evening coat! Oh Mary, you that I have always been so kind to, how could I ever have expected such a thing of you.”
Tears of rage came to the relief of Letitia’s overburdened soul. But she suddenly regained command of herself in a moment, dried her eyes and turned to the door. It was now her own part to stand on the defensive, to prepare, to give explanations and excuses. There was no mistaking the step which was approaching, the heavy step of the outraged husband, he who had never even heard of Ralph’s existence. John Parke was not a man before whom his wife was accustomed to tremble. But she did not know what John might be about to pour forth upon her now.
CHAPTER VII.
John came into the room with gloom upon his countenance, and a frown upon his noble brow. Letitia had arrested the course of her own passion—she had dried her eyes, and dropped her voice, and prepared herself to meet him with a real apprehension. It was not often that she was afraid of John, but for once there was no doubt that if John was in the mind to find fault he had a sufficient reason. The sight of her husband’s troubled face checked her anger and dried up the tears of vexation that had been in her eyes. She gave Mary an appealing look, and made her a motion to sit down by her. It went through her mind quickly that Mary might make a little stand for Ralph when she could not do it herself, and thus break the edge of the assault. If John could be made to see that Ralph was Mary’s old sweetheart, that it was Mary’s indiscretion which had brought him there, it would be easier in every way to manage the dilemma. John came in with his heavy step and his countenance overcast, but he looked like a man perplexed rather than angry, and as he came forward it was apparent that he held a telegram in his hand.
“Look here,” he said, “Letitia, here is a bore: just when we have got the house full to the door: look at that—that he should choose this time of all others for the visit that has been spoken of so long!”
“John,” said Letitia, with a gasp, “I never meant him to come here.”