Olivia saw this too, when helped to it, and bit her lip. It was, assuredly, not right that Count Victor, in the possession of such secrets as this letter revealed, should allow her to throw herself away on the villain there portrayed.
“He may have some reason we cannot guess,” she said, and thought of one that made her heart beat wildly.
“No reason but a Frenchman's would let me lose my daughter to a scamp out of a pure punctilio. I can scarcely believe that he knew all that is in this letter. And you, my dear, you never guessed any more than I that these attacks under cover of night were the work of Simon MacTaggart.”
“I must tell you the truth, father,” said Olivia. “I have known it since the second, and that it was that turned me. I learned from the button that Count Victor picked up on the stair, for I recognised it as his. I knew—I knew—and yet I wished to keep a doubt of it, I felt it so, and still would not confess it to myself that the man I loved—the man I thought I loved—was no better than a robber.” “A robber indeed! I thought the man bad; I never liked his eye and less his tongue, that was ever too plausible. Praise God, my dear, that he's found out!”
CHAPTER XXXVI — LOVE
It was hours before Count Victor could trust himself and his tell-tale countenance before Olivia, and as he remained in an unaccustomed seclusion for the remainder of the day, she naturally believed him cold, though a woman with a fuller experience of his sex might have come to a different conclusion. Her misconception, so far from being dispelled when he joined her and her father in the evening, was confirmed, for his natural gaiety was gone, and an emotional constraint, made up of love, dubiety, and hope, kept him silent even in the precious moments when Doom retired to his reflections and his book, leaving them at the other end of the room alone. Nothing had been said about the letter; the Baron kept his counsel on it for a more fitting occasion, and though Olivia, who had taken its possession, turned it over many times in her pocket, its presentation involved too much boldness on her part to be undertaken in an impulse. The evening passed with inconceivable dulness; the gentleman was taciturn to clownishness; Mungo, who had come in once or twice to replenish fires and snuff candles, could not but look at them with wonder, for he plainly saw two foolish folks in a common misunderstanding.
He went back to the kitchen crying out his contempt for them.
“If yon's coortin',” he said, “it's the drollest I ever clapt een on! The man micht be a carven image, and Leevie no better nor a shifty in the pook. I hope she disnae rue her change o' mind alreadys, for I'll warrant there was nane o' yon blateness aboot Sim MacTaggart, and it's no' what the puir lassie's been used to.”
But these were speculations beyond the sibyl of his odd adoration; Annapla was too intent upon her own elderly love-affairs to be interested in those upstairs.