“That cad’s daughter, heavens and earth!” he said to himself as he brushed the men aside and hastened across the market-place.
He scarcely knew what he said to the frightened station-master and the obsequious mayor, and the bustling town clerk, and all the good people who crowded to welcome a live lord and hear of a railway accident. He was intensely surprised, disproportionately irritated, and sincerely vexed with himself for having spoken so incautiously. He knew that every one of his words must have cut like a knife into the sensitive nerves of this woman whom he had admired and who had looked to him so thoroughbred.
He had felt more attracted to her than he had ever felt to any stranger, and to receive this shock of disillusion left him colder than he had been all day in the mists and the snow.
Suddenly it flashed across his memory that she must be the heiress whom Mouse had desired him to marry. Suspicion awoke in him.
He had not known her but it was very possible she had known him when he had entered the railway-carriage; she had spoken of his likeness to his sister. Her avoidance of any hint as to who she was or whither she was going appeared to him to suggest design. Why had she not disclosed her name until the very last moment? Though a poor man, for his rank, he had been a great deal run after by women on account of his physical beauty, and he was wary and suspicious where women were in question. She had caught him off his guard and he repented it.
If she were in truth William Massarene’s daughter she probably knew the share which his sister had so largely taken in the sales of Vale Royal and Blair Airon; and in the persuasion of society to accept the purchasers. He did not know the details of his sister’s diplomacy, but he guessed enough of them for him to burn with shame at the mere conjecture. When his own kith and kin were foremost in this disgraceful traffic what could his own condemnation of it look like—hypocrisy, affectation, subterfuge?
What had possessed him to talk of such subjects on a public road to a stranger. He never by any chance “gave himself away.” Why had he done so this day merely because he had felt as if he had known for years a woman who had beautiful feet in fur-rimmed boots and a big bouquet of violets?
He was furious at his own folly, and he had told her that story of the fox too, which he had buried so closely in his own breast as men like him do secrete all their best impulses and emotions of which they are more ashamed than of any of their sins and vices! He had never been so incensed and troubled about a trifle in his whole life; and all the high breeding in him made him feel the keenest regret to have so cruelly mortified a woman about her own father and her own position.
To a gentleman the knowledge that he has insulted a person who cannot punish him for it is a very dreadful thing.
He had said no more than he meant, no more than he felt, and nothing which he would have retracted; but he was extremely sorry that he had said it to the daughter of the man Massarene. To the man himself he would have had the greatest pleasure in saying it.