Evelyn was not only astonished but frightened by what he asked of her. She rose up hastily. “You must not think of it—you must not think of it! What could I do for them? I have other duties of my own.”
“It would not be so much trouble,” he said, “only to give an eye to them now and then; to have them with you when you felt inclined to ask them—nothing more. For old friendship’s sake you would not object to have my children on a visit once a year or so. I am sure you would not refuse me that?”
“But that is very different from being their guardian.”
“It would not be, as I should arrange it. You would give them your advice when they wanted it. You would do as much as that for any one, for the gamekeeper’s children, much more for an old friend’s—and see them now and then, and inquire how they were getting on? I should ask nothing more. Evelyn, you wouldn’t refuse an old friend, a disabled, unhappy solitary man like me?”
“Oh, Mr. Saumarez!” she cried. He had tried to raise himself up a little in the fervour of his appeal, but fell back again in a sort of heap, the exertion and the emotion being too much for his strength. The servant appeared in a moment from where he had been watching. “He oughtn’t to be allowed to agitate himself, ma’am,” said the man reproachfully. Evelyn, alarmed, walked humbly beside the chair till they came to the gate of the Park, terrified to think that perhaps he had injured himself, that perhaps she ought to humour him by consenting to anything. He was not allowed to say any more, nor did she add a word, but he put out his hand again and pressed hers feebly as they parted. “Can I do anything?” she had asked the servant in her compunction. “Nothing but leave him quite quiet,” said the man. “It might be as much as his life is worth. I don’t hold with letting ‘em talk.” Saumarez was one of a class, a mere case, to his attendant. And Evelyn felt as if she had been guilty of a kind of murder as she hurried away.
She found Lady Leighton waiting for her for lunch, and slightly disturbed by the delay. “I have a thousand things to do, and the loss of half-an-hour puts one all out,” she said, with a little peevishness; “but I’m sure you had a reason, Evelyn, for being so late.”
“A reason which was much against my will,” said Evelyn, telling the story of her distress, to which her friend listened very gravely. “I should take care not to meet him again,” said Lady Leighton, with a cloud on her brow. “You listen to him out of pure pity, but weak and ailing as he is, it would be sweet to his vanity to compromise a woman even now.”
“I do not understand what you mean,” said Evelyn; “he could not compromise me, if that is it, by anything he could do, were he all that he has ever been.”
“You don’t know what your husband might think,” said her friend; “he wouldn’t like it. He might have every confidence in you—but a man of Ned Saumarez’s character, and an old lover, and all that—he might say——”
“My husband,” said Mrs. Rowland, feeling the blood mount to her head, “has no such ideas in his mind. He neither knows anything about Mr. Saumarez’s character, nor would he even if he did know. You mistake my feeling altogether. It is not anything about my husband that distresses me—it is the trust he wants me to undertake of his children.”