He paused a little and then said, “Yes, I suppose I did. I remember something, but what does all that matter now?”
“It matters having a friend always at hand, to note everything. Oh my boy, don’t go. Stay and work it out—stay and prove who has done it. Archie, take my advice.”
“Why should I, Mrs. Rowland? I have always thought you were my enemy.”
“Very falsely, very falsely!” she cried. “Archie, I promised to your mother I would do all to you that a woman who was not your mother could do.”
“You promised to my mother! What do you know about my mother? It is getting late and I should be on the road: let me go.”
She was holding his arm with both her hands. And she was not his enemy. His heart was charged with wrath, and grievious against her, but he would not think she was his enemy any more—and his mother—the name startled him, and there was something in the close contact with this beautiful lady and the pressure of her hands, that gave Archie a bewildered new sensation in the midst of his rage and misery. The very sense of her superiority—that superiority that had been so humiliating, so sore a subject, and her beauty which he had never appreciated, but which somehow came in to amaze yet touch him, as with the deep curves round her anxious eyes, pale with watching and trouble, she held him and kept him back on the threshold of the friendless world, all evident in the surprise which penetrated through Archie’s wretchedness. Was it a promise of something better at the bottom of the deepest wrong of them all?
“I don’t know what you mean—about my mother—” he said.
“I promised her,” said Evelyn, the tears dropping from her eyes, “when I first caught sight of this house, which should have been hers,—I promised her, that you should be cared for, as if she were here.”
“What was that?” he said, “something touched me—what was that? Who is it? Is there some one playing tricks here?”
He worked himself out of her grasp, turning to the other side, where there was no one nor anything to be seen. It was the darkest hour of the night, and the coldest and most dreary, though indeed, it was already morning, and in many a humble house about the inhabitants were already awake and stirring. But there was a stillness in the deserted hall, as if some one had died there, and all the revellers had fled from the deserted place. He searched about the side of the hall, peering and groping in the feeble miserable light, but came back to where Evelyn stood, coming close to her, shivering, with a scared and blanched face.