‘John, you take away my breath. Why should you go off like this, like a flash of lightning?—and there’s your sister just arrived. Dear me,’ cried Mrs. Egerton, ‘just give this nonsense up, it will be far more reasonable, and take your holiday out.’
‘Must you go, Jack?’ said Elly, quite subdued.
‘If it is only your sister that would detain you,’ said Mr. Cattley, clearing his throat. ‘She will find friends, I am sure. We shall all be glad to do our best for her, if she chooses to stay.’
‘Oh! we’ll look after that. We’ll see to Miss Sandford,’ Percy said.
Mrs. Egerton’s under lip dropped with an almost awe of the miracle happening before her eyes. Mr. Cattley even, her own particular slave! She gave him a look and then turned to Percy: then went off suddenly into an unexpected and, as appeared, quite uncalled-for laugh.
‘Elly,’ she said, ‘the gentlemen are taking it all into their own hands——’
And she who had so much good-humoured, affectionate contempt for the gentlemen, who had followed her lead with such docility for many a day! She did not recover from her astonishment even when John shook hands with her hastily, and hurried off as if he meant to begin collecting those thousands this very day. She had not spirit enough even, save very feebly in a scarcely audible voice, to call back Elly, who hurried after him and who paid no attention to that faint call. She did nothing but stare at the two curates as the sound of the quick young footsteps went downstairs and died away, and then became audible again, going out and through the garden, the gate swinging and clicking after them. Then she said, ‘Elly has gone with him!’ in an appeal and protest to earth and heaven.
‘It can’t be helped,’ said Percy, with a wave of his hand.
Elly followed John out without saying a word, going after him quite solemnly: the colour had gone out of her face, her steps were subdued as if in subjection to his. No fear had been in Elly’s mind. She had been accustomed to find most things yield to her, and she did not see in this new event so great an additional gravity that she should have been brought to a stop in her life, or made to contemplate the idea of failure. Even now she would have fallen back upon the supreme consciousness of her importance in the house, and her father’s incapability of resisting anything she desired, had not that short but most conclusive colloquy between John and Percy confused all her ideas and silenced the words on her lips. Aunt Mary, it is true, was more strenuous in her resistance, more determined than Elly had any idea of; but the girl, who knew the ways of her own race and kind, knew well that even Aunt Mary, after a great deal of impassioned argument, going over and over again every feature of the case, would end by exhausting everything against it, and coming round to the conviction that there was nothing so interesting in life as the young pair and their hopes, and that, however she might shake her head over it, her happiness was involved in Elly’s. That was the strong point of which Elly was quite conscious. Her own happiness was a matter too important to the household to be permanently risked in any way.
But a few words from Percy, for whom she had no veneration, whom she rather scorned in his new sacerdotal assumptions, had changed all this! Elly was confused by the suddenness of the revolution, and did not understand it, nor did she quite understand the hasty, resolute step with which John went on, not observing, apparently, that he was walking out before her. Not that she minded that; it seemed, on the contrary, quite natural. She liked him to forget that he needed to stand on any punctilio with her. The wonderful thing was that Percy had done it all, and that a change had been wrought in John himself by that little curate. There was, then, a freemasonry among them, too. She walked on beside her lover, breathless, finding it a little difficult to keep up with him; and at length, when her mind began to get into working order again, broke the silence with a question.