‘She got her own pardon for it. Her mother is a great gossip, and loves a tale against her neighbour. Don’t blame the girl too much.’
‘If you excuse her, Joan, who should say a word? But why in all the world, thinking of an unlikely person to fasten such a slander upon, did she choose you?’
‘Am I so unlikely, when my brothers believed it?’ she said, with a strange smile.
An hour full of commotion followed. The boys never tired in showing each other and everybody else the flaw in the wood where the framework of the screen had broken.
‘But you must have leant on it very heavily, mamma.’
‘She wanted to break our heads with it,’ said the Colonel, who was in high spirits.
‘Fancy mamma breaking Uncle Rex’s head with the screen!’ the children cried with shrieks of laughter; and thus, in a tumult of amusement and gaiety, the evening closed.
Mrs. Blencarrow went to her room with something cold and hard at her heart like a stone. They had begged her pardon. They had not found that record. By some chance, by some miracle—how could she tell what?—she had escaped detection. But it was true; nothing could alter the fact. Nothing could spirit away him—the husband—the man to whom she had bound herself; the owner of her allegiance, of herself, if he chose to exercise his rights. It occurred to her, in the silence of her room, when she was alone there and dared to think, that her present escape was but an additional despair. Had they found it, as they ought to have found it, the worst would have been over. But now, to have the catastrophe indefinitely postponed—to have it before her every day—the sword hanging over her head, her mind rehearsing day and night what it would be! Would it not be better to go and tell them yet, to have it over? Her hand was on her door to obey this impulse, but her heart failed her. Who could tell? God might be so merciful as to let her die before it was known.
The two gentlemen spent a very merry morning on the ice with the children, and in the afternoon left Blencarrow the best of friends with their sister, grateful to her for her forgiveness. Mrs. Blencarrow did not think it necessary to go out to the pond that afternoon—she was tired, she said—and the skating, which often lasts so short a time that everybody feels it a duty to take advantage of it, had cleared the house. She spent the afternoon alone, sitting over the fire, cold with misery and anxiety and trouble. Everything seemed right again, and yet nothing was right—nothing. False impressions, false blame, can be resisted; but who can hold up their head against a scandal that is true?
It was one of the women servants, in the absence of everybody else, who showed Mr. Germaine into the drawing-room. He was himself very cold and fatigued, having travelled all the previous night, and half the day, returning home. He came to the fire and stood beside her, holding out his hands to the warmth.