Lottie was completely awakened now; she looked up, half-bewildered, from the dispersing mists. “Of whom are you talking?” she cried. “Law, what people have you got among—who are they? You frighten me! Who is it you are talking of?”
“There’s no harm in them,” cried Law, colouring more and more. “What do you mean? Do you think they’re—— I don’t know what you mean; they’re as good as we are,” he added sullenly, walking away with his hands in his pockets out of the revelations of the lamp. Dim and low as it was, it disclosed, he was aware, an uncomfortable glow of colour on his face.
“I don’t know who they may be,” said Lottie, severe, yet blushing too; “I don’t want to know! But, oh, Law! you that are so young, my only brother, why should you know people I couldn’t know? Why should you be ashamed of anyone you go to see?”
“I was not talking of people I go to see; I wish you wouldn’t be so absurd; I’m talking of the governor,” said Law, speaking very fast; “he’s there, I tell you, a man of his time of life, sitting among a lot of girls, talking away fifteen to the dozen. He might find some other way of meeting her if he must meet her!” cried Law, his own grievance breaking out in spite of him. “What has he got to do there among a pack of girls? it’s disgraceful at his age!”
Law was very sore, angry, and disappointed. He had gone to his usual resort in the evening, and had seen his father there before him, and had been obliged to retire discomfited, with a jibe from Emma to intensify his trouble. “The Captain’s twice the man you are!” the little dressmaker had said; “he ain’t afraid of nobody.” Poor Law had gone away after this, and strolled despondently along the river-side. He did not know what to do with himself. Lottie was at the Deanery; he was shut out of his usual refuge, and he had nowhere to go. Though he had no money, he jumped into a boat and rowed himself dismally about the river, dropping down below the bridge to where he could see the lighted windows of the workroom. There he lingered about, nobody seeing or taking any notice of him. When he approached the bank, he could even hear the sound of their voices, the laughter with which they received the Captain’s witticisms. A little wit went a long way in that complaisant circle. He could make out Captain Despard’s shadow against the window, never still for a moment, moving up and down, amusing the girls with songs, jokes, pieces of buffoonery. Law despised these devices; but, oh! how he envied the skill of the actor. He hung about the river in his boat till it got quite dark, almost run into sometimes by other boats, indifferent to everything but this lighted interior, which he could see, though nobody in it could see him. And when he was tired of this forlorn amusement he came home, finding the house very empty and desolate. He tried to work, but how was it possible to work under the sting of such a recollection? The only thing he could do was to wait for Lottie, to pour forth his complaint to her, to hope that she might perhaps find some remedy for this intolerable wrong. It did not occur to him that to betray his father was also to betray himself, and that Lottie might feel as little sympathy for him as he did for Captain Despard. This fact flashed upon him now when it was too late.
Lottie had not risen from her seat, but as she sat there, everything round seemed to waver about her, then settle down again in a sudden revelation of mean, and small, and paltry life, such as she had scarcely ever realised before. Not only the lofty heaven into which the music had carried her rolled away like a scroll, but the other world, which was beautiful also of its kind, from which she had fled, which had seemed too poor to remain in, after the preceding ecstasy, departed as with a glimmer of wings; and she found herself awaking in a life where everything was squalid and poor, where she alone, with despairing efforts, tried to prop up the house that it might not fall into dishonoured dust. She had borne with a kind of contemptuous equanimity Law’s first story about her father. Let him marry again! she had said; if he could secure the thing he called his happiness in such a way, let him do it. The idea had filled her with a high scorn. She had not thought of herself nor of the effect it might have upon her, but had risen superior to it with lofty contempt, and put it from her mind. But this was different. With all her high notions of gentility, and all her longings after a more splendid sphere, this sudden revelation of a sphere meaner, lower still, struck Lottie with a sudden pang. A pack of girls! what kind of girls could those be of whom Law spoke? Her blood rushed to her face scorching her with shame. She who scorned the Chevaliers and their belongings! She who had “kept her distance” from her own class, was it possible that she was to be dragged down lower, lower, to shame itself? Her voice was choked in her throat. She did not feel able to speak. She could only cry out to him, clasping her hands, “Don’t tell me any more—oh, don’t tell me any more——”
“Hillo!” said the lad, “what is the matter with you? Don’t tell you any more? You will soon know a great deal more if you don’t do something to put a stop to it. There ought to be a law against it. A man’s children ought to be able to put a stop to it. I told you before, Lottie, if you don’t exert yourself and do something——”
“Oh,” she said, rising to her feet, “what can I do? Can I put honour into you, and goodness, and make you what I want you to be? Oh, if I could, Law! I would give you my blood out of my veins if I could. But I can’t put me into you,” she said, wringing her hands—“and you expect me to listen to stories—about people I ought not to hear of—about women—Oh, Law, Law, how dare you speak so to me?”
“Hold hard!” said Law, “you don’t know what you are speaking of. The girls are as good girls as you are—” his own cheeks flushed with indignant shame as he spoke. “You are just like what they say of women. You are always thinking of something bad. What are you after all, Lottie Despard? A poor shabby Captain’s daughter! You make your own gowns and they make other people’s. I don’t see such a dreadful difference in that.”
Lottie was overpowered by all the different sensations that succeeded each other in her. She felt herself swept by what felt like repeated waves of trouble—shame to hear of these people among whom both her father and brother found their pleasure, shame to have thought more badly of them than they deserved, shame to have betrayed to Law her knowledge that there were women existing of whom to speak was a shame. She sank down upon the sofa again trembling and agitated, relieved yet not relieved. “Law,” she said faintly, “we are poor enough ourselves, I know. But even if we don’t do much credit to our birth, is it not dreadful to be content with that, to go down lower, to make ourselves nothing at all?”