“Come, keep up your pecker,” said Mr. Massarene in what he meant to be a kindly encouragement. “Come, tell me what the matter is, my pretty one.”
She started like a doe past whose side a bullet whistles as the odious familiarity struck her ear—the familiarity which she did not dare to resent, the familiarity which told her how much the expression of her face must have confessed already. With dilated nostrils, through which her breath came and went rapidly and in short pulsations, she plunged midmost into her story: the story as arranged and decorated and trimmed by her own intelligent skill, wherein she was plainly the victim of circumstance, of her own ignorance, of a tradesman’s deceitfulness, and of her relatives’ cruelty and harshness. The old duke, she averred, had given her the jewels; but it seemed there was nothing to show that he had done so, and her brother and brothers-in-law were so inconceivably base as to doubt her word for it, and to claim them for the heir as “real estate.” No woman, she thought, had ever been so brutally treated in the whole history of the world.
She spoke at first hesitatingly and with visible embarrassment, but she grew more at her ease as she got her story well in hand, and she became eloquent in the description of her wrongs.
William Massarene followed her narrative attentively and without interruption, leaning a little forward with his hands on his knee and glancing round to see that no one was in sight to wonder at his flattering but compromising tête-à-tête. He was magnetized by her voice, dazzled by her eyes, but what she spoke of was a matter of business and he was beyond all else a man of business. Business was his own domain. On that he was master; in that it was not in the power of anyone to cheat him. His sharp perception quickly understood her position, disentangled facts from fiction, and comprehended in what danger she was placed. He did not let her see that he knew she was glossing over and changing the circumstances; but he did know it, and stripped the false from the true in his own reflections as surely as he had shifted gold from quartz in his days in the gold-fields. He could have turned her narrative inside out and rent it to pieces in a second, but he forbore to do so, and appeared to accept her version of the matter as she presented it to him.
“But what made you take the jewels to this Beaumont?” he asked her as she paused.
“I wanted money,” she said sullenly.
“Was it before you knew me?”
“Just before.”
“And you asked nobody’s advice?”
“No.”