Mary hurried forward, feeling herself crimson with shame, and met him in the middle of the glade. “It can’t be too open for what I have to say to you,” she said; then added most inconsiderately, “We had surely better go back to the house. We shall be less remarked there.”
“I don’t think you know what you mean,” he said, thrusting his arm through hers, and holding it as though to lean upon her. “That’s a woman all over. Gives you a meeting and then’s frightened to keep it. I’ve been a rover, I don’t deny it, and I know their ways. You like me all the better now, don’t you, for knowing all your little ways?”
He held her arm, drawing her close to him, and bending over her, surrounding the prim and gentle Mary, fastidious old maid as she was, with that atmosphere of stale tobacco and half-exhausted spirits which breathes from some men. He reminded her of the sensations she had experienced in passing the village public-house, but she was not passing it, she was involved in it now, surrounded by its sickening breath. Every kind of humiliation and horror was in that contact to Mary. She tried in vain to draw herself out of his hold.
“Ralph, oh, please let me go. I have got a message for you. That was why I asked you to come here.”
He laughed and leaned over her more than ever, disgusting more than words could say this shrinking woman, whom he believed in his heart he was treating as women love best to be treated. “Come, now,” he said, “Mary, my love, don’t go on pretending: as if I wasn’t up to all these dodges. Say honest you wanted a word with your old sweetheart without Tisch spying on you with them sharp eyes of hers. And how she’s gone off. She’s as ugly as a toad—and stuck up! I daresay she’d think her brother was demeaning himself to the governess—eh? You’re the governess, ain’t you?” Mr. Ravelstone said.
“I am not the governess; and if either you or she think I would demean myself——” Mary’s habitual gentleness made her all the more fiery and impassioned now—the fierceness of a dove. She disengaged herself from his hold with the vehemence of her sudden movement. She stood panting beyond his reach and addressed him. “Don’t come a step nearer! I have a message to you from Tisch. Can’t you see, if you have any sense at all, that she cannot want you here?”
He gave her a strange and angry look. “What do you mean? Tisch—my own sister: you’ve gone out of your mind, Mary Hill.”
“It is you that have gone out of your mind. Look at her house, and the way she lives. Look at her husband, a gentleman. Mr. Parke may be stupid, but he is a gentleman. Didn’t you understand last night how she was feeling? What has a man like you to do here? Why, at Grocombe—even at Grocombe they would feel it; and fancy what it must be here.”
“What would they feel at Grocombe?” said Ralph, growing doubly red, and looking at her with a threatening air.
Mary paused. To hurt anyone was impossible to her—she could not do it. She looked at him; at the droop of his features, from which the jaunty air of complacence had gone, and at his debasement and deterioration, which were so evident in her eyes, not to be mistaken; and her courage failed her. “Oh! Ralph,” she said, “there is a difference. It’s not only money, or the want of money. You know there is a difference. She wants you to go away.”