“Happy third person!” said the invalid, with a gleam of those wolfish, eager eyes out of the partial gloom. “I would I were one of those third persons. And Rowland, my good friend, does he know all about it, and of a necessity so strong that a lovely lady had almost forced her way into Eddy’s room?”
“Mr. Saumarez,” said Evelyn, feeling her cheeks burn. “My husband knows, or will know, exactly in every particular what I have done, and will approve of it. You know what a boy of Eddy’s age, and lately a visitor in my own house, the companion of my husband’s son, must be to me.”
“Age is very deceitful,” said Saumarez with a laugh, “especially in Eddy’s case, if you will permit me to say it. He is not a boy, as you will call him, to be judged by mere numerals. Eddy is one of the sons occasionally to be met with in highly civilized life, who are older than their fathers. Even a husband’s son, dear lady, has been known to be not over-safe,” he added with again that mocking laugh.
“There is no question of safety,” said Evelyn. She felt the blaze of shame to be so addressed, enveloping her from head to foot like a fire. “You must pardon me if I say that this is a kind of conversation very unpleasing to me,” she said with spirit, “and most uncalled for.” His laugh sounded like the laugh of a devil in her ears.
“Nay,” he said, “you must not let my precious balms break your head. I speak as a friend, and in your best interests, Evelyn.”
“My name is Mrs. Rowland, Mr. Saumarez.”
“Oh! if I could ever forget the time when you were not Mrs. Rowland, but my Evelyn! But that, of course, is not to the purpose,” he added with a sigh, at which he presently laughed. “We get sentimental. Dear lady, if you will let me say it, your age is precisely the one which is most dangerous, and in which a taste for youth has been often shown, in various conspicuous examples.”
Evelyn rose to her feet with a start of offence and shame. She had not known it was in her to be so wildly, almost fiercely angry. “Not another word!” she said. “You abuse your privileges as a sick man. I will not hear another word.”
“And what,” he said in a low voice, stretching out his hand to detain her, “if I—or Rogers—were to let my good friend Rowland know that he had difficulty in preventing the trusted and honoured wife from making a forcible entrance into a young man’s room?”
If Evelyn had been a weak or unreasoning woman, had she been without trust in her husband or herself, had she been apt to concealment, or to believe, as so many do, that an evil motive is always the most readily believed in—it is possible that she might at this odious moment, a moment she could never bear to think of after—have been lost one way or other, bound as a miserable thrall under this man’s power, whose malignant mouth could have done her such vile and frightful injury. But fortunately she was none of these things. It had not even once occurred to her that her determination to see Eddy, wherever she might find him, would have been made the subject of any remark. And if she now perceived that it was a foolish and imprudent thing, the discovery was made in a moment of such extreme excitement that it had no effect upon her. She stood by him for a second, towering over him in a wrath which possessed and inspired her. “Do so,” she said, “at once: or rather let Rogers do so, Mr. Saumarez. It will not be so degrading to him, a man without instruction, possibly knowing no better, as it would be to you. And besides, he could speak from personal knowledge. His letter will find my husband at Rosmore. Good-bye.”